As a sci-fi game primarily set in space, spaceships are a core part of Warframe both functionally and aesthetically. Most of Warframe unravels on the planets of the Origin System, whether on the ground or aboard the various Grineer galleons or corpus crew-ships orbiting them. Your landing craft, however, is a lingering presence in all of these adventures.
Landing Crafts are your primary vessel for going in and out of the field, as well as your humble abode for the downtime between missions. While you have the Liset landing craft by default, you can obtain various other landing crafts by farming their components or purchasing them with Platinum.
Rather than just adding cosmetic flavor to your loading screen, different landing crafts also unlocked their unique "air support" ability. To use these abilities, you must craft Air Support charges in the Foundry, equip them on your Gear wheel, and then deploy them during a mission from there.
Like Warframes themselves, air support abilities provide various utilities that may not suit all situations. As you can only equip one air support ability at a time, the following ranking is based on how universally useful they are.
Skaut, Xiphos, and more Warframe Air support abilities ranked (2024)
7) Scimitar - Carpet Bomb
Carpet Bomb, as the name implies, drops a volley of mini-rockets in a straight line. While an actual air strike is much on-brand for an "air support charge," Scimitar's ability deals a pitiful amount of token damage in practice.
Back in 2015, when it was originally introduced, the 250 Impact damage and the ragdoll on all non-eximus enemies may have been marginally useful, but that is not the case today. Unless there's a rework, Scimitar does not have much value outside of its cosmetic quality.
6) Xiphos - Sentry Gun
Sentry Gun is a self-explanatory air support ability, summoning a stationary turret. While the help it provides is nearly as negligible as Scimitar's carpet bomb, the Sentry Gun has the additional use of being a very fragile tool to divert enemy attention. Its high fire rate comes down to no meaningful DPS due to its shots being Puncture-heavy.
5) Mantis - Med Tower
Mantis was the first-ever alternate landing craft introduced to Warframe back in 2015. It gives you the Med Tower ability, summoning a structure similar to Life Support capsules in the Survival game mode.
Activating it gives the player in question 100 health, and it disappears after 25 uses. Given how many tools there are to regain health in Warframe today, the necessity of cheap regeneration methods like Med Tower is almost negligible.
4) Nightwave - Dreamers
Obtainable as a Nightwave reward, Nora's trademark vessel provides much more cosmetic appeal than it does functionality. Its ability, Dreamers, inflicts the sleep status on all enemies within a 10-meter radius when cast.
This is much like Equinox's Rest and Rage, and the enemies wake up after 20 minutes or if they receive damage. You can use this as a setup for stealth kills or to extend a stealth kill multiplier while farming Affinity through that method. However, the high cooldown between uses limits is practicality.
3) Liset - Override
Liset is the default landing craft when starting your Warframe journey. Surprisingly, Liset's Override provides a unique utility that cannot be obtained elsewhere. If used when enemies are on high alert, it will reset lockdown status across the tileset and disable alarms.
Override's more useful component is its often overlooked secondary effect: it will pause timers in Spy and Rescue missions when you are detected, buying you that extra few seconds to secure the objective.
2) Skaut - Kahl Beacon
Obtainable from the Kahl's Garrison faction, Skaut lets you summon Skaut and his brothers-in-arm to aid you in a mission. Spawning a total of three allies who scale with enemy level, Kahl Beacon is one of the best abilities to simplify defending an objective.
Equipped with Gattler and other weaponry from Kahl missions, these mercenaries also pack quite a punch. With an armor strip ability, the damage is enough to mow down even Steel Path targets.
1) Parallax - Orokin Eye
Originally meant to find Voidplume Quills hidden within Zariman Ten-Zero nodes, Parallax's Orokin Eye is one of the most important tools bottled inside an air support ability.
Once used, Orokin Eye will highlight several objects of interest within a 150-meter radius. The covered objects include all sorts of trinkets, from Ayatan Treasures to Syndicate Medallions.
While the search radius is smaller than that of the Golden Instinct Helminth ability, Orokin Eye highlights all objects in an area not only for you but for the entire squad.