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Meet X-WING: 50km VTOL Loitering Munition Designed for Squad-Level Strikes, Already Testing in Ukraine
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![Photo of Vlad Litnarovych]( "Photo of Vlad Litnarovych")
Lithuanian firm Granta Autonomy unveiled a new loitering munition, the X‑WING—a lightweight VTOL strike drone designed for infantry units—the Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported on October 8.
The company says testing began in spring and that all advertised performance metrics have already been validated.
“Currently, we are producing small batches of X‑WING and handing them over for additional trials with front‑line Ukrainian units. Constant operational use on the front is part of the system’s validation,” Granta CEO and founder Gediminas Guoba told Militarnyi.
✅ Lithuanian company Granta Autonomy has developed a loitering munition called X-WING, which—Ukrainian sources say—is being field-tested in real combat conditions in Ukraine.
— NSTRIKE (@NSTRIKE1231) October 9, 2025
🔻 Specs & capabilities: VTOL (vertical take-off and landing); weighs 12 kg with ~4 kg warhead; current… pic.twitter.com/VhZWosbEUx
Granta expects to scale to several hundred airframes per month early next year; the platform was designed from the start for mass production. X‑WING combines a quadcopter-style vertical takeoff and landing with winged, energy‑efficient cruise flight, letting squads launch the munition without specialized infrastructure.
“A range of 50 km is the baseline specification that will be improved. However, we will consistently balance extended X‑WING capabilities with its production cost,” Guoba said.
The munition carries a multi-purpose warhead intended to defeat both lightly armored targets and personnel or radar sites via fragmentation. Sensors include a proprietary micro‑gimbal “Granta camera” with long‑range daylight imaging and thermal mode for night operations; the gimbal also supports GNSS‑denied navigation.
Granta’s datalink is compatible with standard ground stations, and guidance integrates AI elements to assist operators in detecting concealed targets.
The company says the X‑WING is hard to intercept because of its speed, agility, and the tactic of simultaneous swarm attacks—a mass‑launch approach that, Granta argues, improves success rates against many counter‑UAS systems.
Full swarm autonomy (a mesh network with high‑level autonomy) remains under development, but Granta says a fully “intelligent” swarm would raise system costs; for now, the emphasis is on simple, effective mass‑launch tactics.
Granta Autonomy X‑WING features a 4kg ESAD (explosive/fragmentation) warhead and weighs 12kg in total, travels at speeds of more than 144 km/h, has daylight optics + thermal on Granta micro‑gimbal as well as GNSS‑independent modes. The target price of one drone is under $11,600 at scale, according to Granta Autonomy.
Earlier, Ukraine’s Atarna unveiled a new fixed-wing loitering munition dubbed “Zhuk,” demonstrated at Brave1 public trials and designed to hit targets at distances exceeding 40 kilometers.
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