Ghost

Ghost is a small autonomous helicopter unmanned aerial system built by Anduril Industries , the California-based defence firm founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey. The platform entered service in 2020 and is built around a single-rotor VTOL airframe that a lone operator can unpack and launch within roughly two minutes. Its role is short-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for ground forces and special-operations teams — the kind of close, persistent overwatch that fixed-wing tactical drones struggle to provide because they need a runway or a launcher.

The aircraft is tightly coupled to Lattice, Anduril’s autonomy and command-and-control software, which handles flight, sensor cueing and target tracking with minimal operator input. That coupling is what distinguishes Ghost from earlier compact ISR helicopters: the operator marks an area or a target on a tablet and the aircraft executes the rest, fusing its electro-optical and infrared imagery into the same operational picture used by other Anduril systems. Endurance sits at around 100 minutes per flight and the payload bay is modular, so the aircraft can be reconfigured between EO/IR balls, signals-intelligence packages or communications relays without redesigning the airframe.

Ghost is fielded by the United States, the United Kingdom and Ukraine. The clearest production customer is US Special Operations Command, which adopted the system to support reconnaissance and direct-action missions where small footprint and quiet operation matter more than range. The British Army has flown Ghost as part of its ongoing experimentation with small autonomous ISR. In Ukraine, the platform has been used alongside other Western-supplied drones since 2022, where operators have reported on its ability to find targets at night and pass coordinates back to artillery and loitering munitions.

The product line has continued to develop since first delivery. Ghost 4, the variant most often photographed in service, is the workhorse; Anduril has also disclosed work on heavier-lift and longer-endurance derivatives intended to carry more capable sensors or extend mission times beyond two hours. The company markets the family as a building block in a wider system rather than a standalone aircraft, with Ghost feeding sensor data into Lattice and receiving tasking from the same network that controls Anduril’s ground sensors and counter-UAS effectors.

Within the small-UAS market Ghost sits between consumer-derived quadcopters and traditional military rotary platforms — heavier and more capable than a Skydio or Parrot, but far smaller and cheaper to operate than a Schiebel Camcopter or an MQ-8 Fire Scout. Its survival in operational use, particularly in Ukraine, has become the strongest argument for the autonomy-first approach Anduril has pushed since its founding.