Swarm Aero, a developer of large uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms, today announced it has selected Honeywell Aerospace's TPE331 turboprop engine as the powerplant for its large-scale, multi-mission Group 5 UAS. Swarm is building production-ready aircraft at speed and scale, with first aircraft propulsion systems already supplied under this initial contract.

Swarm's aircraft is designed at the intersection of range, payload capacity, and cost-effectiveness, and with the TPE331 as the propulsion system, will deliver mission-critical capabilities unmatched by any existing platform.

"In many ways, an aircraft is designed around its powerplant. It's a deep relationship that requires both the aircraft maker and engine maker to work extremely closely together. When we evaluated our options, we were looking for an engine manufacturer that saw us as more than a customer, and we found exactly that in Honeywell," said Peter Kalogiannis, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Swarm Aero. "The TPE331 is a proven, cost-effective, high-performance engine with an extraordinary legacy, and we're proud to build our aircraft around it."

Honeywell's renowned propulsion expertise and proven track record as a trusted engineering partner make them the ideal choice to power Swarm Aero's category-defining aircraft. The two companies are actively working together across multiple dimensions of aircraft design and development, maintenance, and operations.

"The defence landscape is shifting toward collaborative, distributed, and autonomous operations, where delivering capability at scale is as critical as innovation itself. Programmes like this show how the future of defence aviation will be built—pairing proven, production-ready systems with next-generation platforms to field capability faster and more affordably," said Matt Milas, President, Defence and Space, Honeywell Aerospace. "By combining the trusted performance of the TPE331 with Swarm Aero's platform, we're enabling a new model for rapidly deploying mission-ready systems. Partnerships like this—bringing together Honeywell Aerospace's depth of experience and the speed of a startup—are essential to delivering the pace and production capacity these missions demand."

The selection of the TPE331 with its decades-long track record exemplifies Swarm Aero's design philosophy, integrating proven aerospace systems and commercially proven technology to drive down cost in the next generation of large defence aircraft. The TPE331, originally certified in 1965, continuously refined over six decades, and with a record of 13,000 engines delivered and 122 million flight hours across military, commercial, and agricultural aviation, is a reliable and scalable long-range propulsion system.

"We're not just building an aircraft but an ecosystem that can produce and operate them at scale," said Oliver Palmer, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder, Swarm. "Merging cutting-edge technology with proven, reliable systems, like the TPE331 is a key need of our customers, and what the company is designed from the ground-up to achieve. This is truly a sea change in thinking focused not on the individual aircraft, but on the capabilities of the swarm."

Swarm's multimission Group 5 UAS is designed to operate at scale under the command of small teams using Swarm's command and control software. The aircraft will be publicly revealed later this year. The company recently opened an 80,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Centre in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and has raised $59 million in total funding, including its recent $35 million Series A round led by Two Sigma Ventures and Silent Ventures.