AeroVironment pulled the cover off Mayhem 10 at AAAA 2026 in Nashville on April 15. It’s the first product in the new Mayhem family and the clearest signal yet that Launched Effects is what comes after Switchblade.
The hardware
Mayhem 10 is a 29-pound airframe, 42 pounds fully loaded, hauling a 10-pound payload. Cruise at 80 mph, sprint past 120 mph, 50 minutes endurance, 100 km reach. A two-soldier team gets it airborne in under five minutes. AeroVironment is planning 2,000 units a year.
It’s autonomous and multi-role by design — not a one-shot kamikaze, not a classic ISR bird. The pitch is: one airframe, whatever the mission calls for.
The payload interface
This is the part developers care about. The front payload bay has a published interface, so third parties can integrate their own modules — EO/IR ISR, electronic warfare, comms relay, decoys, precision warheads — without waiting on AVAV to do the work for them.
For Army and defense OEM integrators, that’s a payload SDK-style entry point instead of a sealed box. It’s how you grow a swarm ecosystem instead of a single-vendor catalog. Expect the first third-party modules to show up once the Army finalizes which mission kits it actually wants.
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