The Ministry of Defence has said no weapon system has yet been selected for the Royal Navy’s planned uncrewed helicopter, while confirming that the Proteus demonstrator is expected to achieve its first flight this month.

Responding to a series of written questions from Conservative MP James Cartlidge, defence minister Luke Pollard said that no specific effector has been chosen for the new uncrewed rotary-wing project being supported under the £140 million UK Defence Innovation funding announced in December.

Pollard said: “No specific effector (or weapon system) has been procured for this project yet.” He added that the work is intended to explore “the most effective means of countering air-to-air threats, which may or may not involve the use of a specific weapon system”.

In separate answers, Pollard provided an update on the Royal Navy’s Proteus Technology Demonstrator Project, which is intended to inform the future of uncrewed maritime aviation. He said the programme is “testing the efficacy of a large, unmanned helicopter, designed from the outset to incorporate modular payloads and a high degree of autonomy, to fulfil a range of warfighting roles for the Royal Navy”.

According to Pollard, the Proteus demonstrator programme will “culminate with the first flight of the air vehicle, expected to take place in January 2026”. He noted that Proteus is not intended for operational deployment, but rather to generate data and experience for future programmes.

On deployment timelines, Pollard said the Royal Navy “intends to take the knowledge gained from Proteus to inform the development of an operational rotary wing platform for maritime surveillance and strike roles during the next decade”.

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21 COMMENTS

  1. Dropping Sonar buoys or a podded lightweight dipping sonar to support Wildcat? That would make up for the Type 31s lack of ASW capability.

    • If the T31 doesn’t have the equipment to analyse the data and act on it there’s little point in putting those assets onboard.

      • You don’t need a lot of kit to analyse sonar buoys these days. The days of needing racks of servers are gone.

        A couple of decent laptops with the requisite comms links. Remember they are limited bandwidth.

  2. Another expensive drone development that delivers zero capability.

    This platform has gone from being the future AWACS and wildcat/merlin replacement to tech demonstrator with no plan to purchase it.

    • Thanks Jim I had begun to think I had missed something. Since when has this changed from a proposal for planned active initial deployment in the future (in a similar sense to Dragonfire a while back I had thought) to being a mere test bed to determine what will be created for such this purpose sometime in the future. All sounds very nebulous to me and another ex use for delay.

      • It was always techically a demonstrator, although everyone kept calling it a prototype. At DSEI 2025 Nigel Colman, the head honcho of Leonardo Helicopters (UK) said, “this is not what a Proteus would look like in the future…Fenestron and tail rotors are probably not perfect in a really high sea state, high winds on the back of a ship in the North Atlantic. This is not an ideal platform, but it’s low risk, it’s low cost, and it gives us the opportunity to test the technologies and the autonomy.”

        So they took £60m and delivered something that they knew wasn’t what was needed, spending most of the money on the autonomy software instead, that and a synthetic test environment. These are the elements that profit Leonardo’s HQ in Italy. In fact Colman went on to say that because the system had been tested in silico, it wasn’t even necessary to fly it in the real world. “My view has always been that we don’t actually need to fly this particular anything, because we can fully test the digital twin and the important autonomous bits in a single, better synthetic environment”.

        For some reason MOD disagreed with what was important and said Leonardo needed to fly the thing, which they are now doing. Whether it will ever fly off the back of a ship is anyone’s guess.

        • I’m not sure I’d agree that digital testing is so good you don’t need any real world data.

          I think MoD are right to do IRL testing.

          What was Coleman proposing? dDigital T&E only: order a load of them and discover the issues? Can you imagine the pile on if that had happened?

          • History is littered with poor quality prototypes in all areas. Sometimes you just need to take a risk. I wouldn’t have too much of a problem if they just said it needs to be capable of carrying additional weight equivelent to that of a range of sensors and/or weapons.

    • Yes, but money to the MIC! MoD won’t be getting its money back for the outlay and jobs and all. Who wants capability and the forces properly equipped anyway??? Sarcasm, but the same old record has been repeated for so long now many start to believe it, including me.

      • Tech demonstrators are very important mate. Think EAP, or the Tempest demonstrator in the next couple of years. They can de-risk a lot of unproven tech when it comes to putting something into production and service.

        • Hi mate.
          I concede that, but wasn’t the EAP built once the Eurofighter programme had already been decided on?
          I don’t see any commitment for anything from this government beyond words, which can be rowed back on.

  3. “He noted that Proteus is not intended for operational deployment, but rather to generate data and experience for future programmes.”
    And WHEN will that excuse ever change? We have been informing decisions and kicking cans for the last 20 years.

    • In this case at least the future programme will be nearly identical to the tech demonstrator rather than just ‘anything we might want to do in the future’. The MoD has been quite hard done by how arrogantly Leonardo seem to have treated this programme, and more ASW is one of the priorities at the moment.

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