Hornet

The Hornet is a low-cost fixed-wing strike drone built by Swift Beat , the Ukraine-focused venture backed by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and tied in reporting to its sister firm Perennial Autonomy. Through 2025 and 2026 it became the weapon Ukrainian crews lean on for “road-cutting”: one-way attacks on the Russian trucks, fuel tankers and supply convoys that keep the front fed. Built largely of polystyrene, with a roughly 2.2-metre wingspan and a take-off weight near 15 kilograms, the Hornet is launched from a pneumatic catapult and then flies on a near-silent electric propeller — quiet enough that Russian troops often report hearing nothing until impact. Reported unit cost is around $6,000.

Its defining feature is autonomy in the terminal phase. A downward-facing camera locks onto a target and stabilises the dive, while AI optical-electronic recognition lets the drone pick out and finish a Russian truck or armoured vehicle even after the link to its operator is severed. Navigation is visual and inertial rather than satellite-dependent — the trait Russian observers nicknamed “Martian,” in the mistaken belief it drew on NASA’s Mars technology — which is what lets the Hornet keep flying through the GPS jamming that grounds many other drones. A France 24 Observers review of strike footage put its success rate above 80 percent, with most documented hits landing more than 80 kilometres behind the line.

The hardware tells a second story: it is built from commodity parts and open-source software. Captured airframes show the Hornet uses the widely available RTL8812EU Wi-Fi chip and runs open-source firmware — WFB-NG combined with OpenIPC — a digital video-link stack that many Russian drone detectors struggle to see.

That commodity basis is also why so much is known about the drone. Russian technical Telegram channels, among them UAVDEV and others, have recovered downed Hornets, photographed the warheads, modules and airframe, and published part lists and firmware repository links. The effect is a kind of open battlefield marketplace, where each side studies the other’s components in near real time — a dynamic that has done little to slow the Hornet’s spread along Russia’s supply roads.