Swarm Aero announced it has selected Honeywell Aerospace’s TPE331 turboprop engine as the powerplant for its large-scale, multi-mission Group 5 uncrewed aircraft system (UAS).

The company said it is building production-ready aircraft at speed and scale, with the first aircraft propulsion systems already supplied under the initial contract.

Swarm’s aircraft is designed to balance range, payload capacity and cost-effectiveness. The company said the integration of the TPE331 engine is intended to provide mission-critical capabilities for its 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,” said Peter Kalogiannis, chief executive officer and co-founder of Swarm Aero. “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. 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 and Swarm said they are working together across multiple areas of aircraft design and development, maintenance and operations.

“The defense landscape is shifting toward collaborative, distributed, and autonomous operations, where delivering capability at scale is as critical as innovation itself,” said Matt Milas, president of defense and space at Honeywell Aerospace. “Programs like this show how the future of defense aviation will be built—pairing proven, production-ready systems with next-generation platforms to field capability faster and more affordably.”

Milas said combining the TPE331 engine with Swarm’s platform is intended to support rapid deployment of mission-ready systems and reflects a broader effort to increase production capacity and operational readiness.

Swarm said its selection of the TPE331 aligns with its strategy of incorporating proven aerospace systems and commercially available technologies to reduce costs for next-generation defense aircraft.

Originally certified in 1965, the TPE331 has been refined over six decades. Honeywell said more than 13,000 engines have been delivered, accumulating more than 122 million flight hours across military, commercial and agricultural aviation applications.

“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 of 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.”

Swarm’s multi-mission Group 5 UAS is designed to operate at scale under the command of small teams using the company’s command-and-control software. The aircraft is expected to be publicly unveiled later this year.

The company recently opened an 80,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and said it has raised $59 million in funding, including a recent $35 million Series A financing round led by Two Sigma Ventures and Silent Ventures.

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Swarm Aero selects Honeywell turboprop engine for Group 5 uncrewed aircraft

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