AeroVironment Switchblade (300/600) vs Teal Black Widow in 2026

AeroVironment Switchblade (300/600)

AeroVironment's Switchblade is a family of tube-launched loitering munitions: the Switchblade 300 (anti-personnel) and Switchblade 600 (anti-armor). These are military weapon systems, not consumer products, so there is no consumer price. They are mass-produced and supplied to the US Army under a nearly $1B IDIQ and sent to Ukraine; the US Army program of record is LMAMS (Lethal Miniature Aerial Missile System).

As a legacy-prime loitering-munition archetype, the Switchblade is operator-launched and operator-committed to target: it is not a fully autonomous weapon, and the autonomy framing for loitering munitions is cap-flagged honestly. Recorded at production maturity on named contracts and combat fielding.

Teal Black Widow

The Teal Black Widow is a soldier-borne ISR rucksack quadcopter from Teal Drones, a subsidiary of Red Cat Holdings (NASDAQ: RCAT). It is a hand-launched, foldable Group-1 quadcopter for single-operator short-range reconnaissance, carrying a Teledyne FLIR Hadron 640R+ EO/IR payload, an AES-256 frequency-hopping radio, and a Qualcomm RB5 AI-capable compute module running FLIR's Prism AI stack, with about 45 minutes of endurance and roughly five miles of link range.

It is military procurement, not a consumer product, so there is no consumer price. Several aggregator framings are corrected here. The product is the Teal Black Widow, not 'Teal 2'.

Its load-bearing fact is verified: the Black Widow won the US Army Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) Program of Record in a production selection announced November 19, 2024, displacing the incumbent Skydio. But the scope is cap-flagged: the actual low-rate initial production contract is about $12.9M per a US Army FOIA disclosure, not the larger management-framing figures, and the often-cited 5,880-systems number is the Army's stated five-year objective (explicitly subject to change), not an obligated quantity.

The common 'Black Hornet alternative' framing is also incorrect: the Black Widow is a different and larger class than Teledyne FLIR's roughly 70-gram Black Hornet nano-UAV, and it replaced Skydio on the platoon-level SRR program rather than the Black Hornet. On autonomy, it is primarily a manually piloted ISR drone with assistive autonomy (forward obstacle avoidance, FLIR Prism, a radio-off stealth mode), so any 'autonomous drone' characterization is an overclaim. The registry records it at low-rate production maturity; Red Cat is a cash-burning small-cap reliant on dilutive financing.