Aeronautica Imperialis Animated Series Brings Imperial Navy Dogfights to Warhammer Plus

Craftworld Saim-Hann Nightwings are coming for the Imperial Navy's Thunderbolts, and Warhammer+ subscribers will have a front-row seat in May. Games Workshop confirmed Aeronautica Imperialis, a three-part animated series set to stream on Warhammer TV, with a new trailer and first details published on Warhammer Community on March 26.

The series is described as "a tale of dogfights, daring and a brutal war of attrition in the skies above a frozen world," and the structure keeps its focus narrow: no Primarchs, no ground wars, just pilots and the machines they fly until those machines stop flying back.

One of those pilots is Kae, named as one of the series' central perspectives. Anchoring the story through a specific pilot's point of view is a shift from Warhammer animation's more common approach of sweeping faction-level narratives, and it gives the three-part arc somewhere to go emotionally as the attrition mounts.

The trailer played up the visual gulf between the two sides. Thunderbolt cockpits are all brutalist angles and rugged Imperial utility; the Saim-Hann Nightwings have an almost luxurious finish to their interiors, the kind of craftsmanship reflecting a civilisation that has had millennia to perfect its war machines. That contrast does ideological work as much as aesthetic work, and it is doing so at a level of animation fidelity that prior Warhammer shorts rarely reached.

"Aeronautica Imperialis will be a three-part animated series, and the first one lands in just a few weeks!" Warhammer Community confirmed in the March 26 announcement.

For anyone with a Thunderbolt or Nightwing sitting unpainted on the shelf, the timing is notable. Canonical reference footage for aircraft markings, cockpit interiors, and Saim-Hann colour schemes is genuinely useful material, and hobby content creators tend to move on it fast. The series also hands narrative players three episodes of aerial campaign structure to plunder for linked missions and air combat scenarios on arena-sized tables.

The first instalment lands in May on Warhammer TV. The skies above that frozen world open soon.