The Defence Investment Plan sets out an autonomous replacement for the Royal Navy’s Wildcat maritime helicopters and increasingly autonomous rotorcraft flying from frigates and destroyers, as the Fleet Air Arm shifts towards uncrewed flight.
The Royal Navy’s Wildcat maritime helicopters are to be replaced by autonomous aircraft, with the Defence Investment Plan setting out a future in which increasingly autonomous rotorcraft fly from the fleet’s frigates and destroyers, the plan said.
The plan listed among its commitments “an autonomous replacement for Wildcat maritime helicopters,” and described a Hybrid Carrier Air Wing flanked by increasingly autonomous rotorcraft operating off escort vessels, a signal that the small crewed helicopters now flown from the back of warships will in time give way to uncrewed machines doing the same jobs.
The Wildcat in this maritime role, the HMA2 version flown by the Fleet Air Arm, is a different aircraft from the Army’s battlefield reconnaissance Wildcat that the plan retires from 2027, and it operates from the flight decks of the Royal Navy’s frigates and destroyers in the anti-surface and reconnaissance role and in support of anti-submarine operations, armed with Martlet and Sea Venom missiles and acting as the eyes of a warship far beyond its own horizon. Replacing it with autonomous systems would extend a pattern the Navy is applying right across its aviation, in which uncrewed platforms take on roles once reserved for crewed aircraft.
The Royal Navy has already been preparing the ground for this, having run trials of uncrewed rotorcraft as technology demonstrators, including work with industry on a crewless helicopter able to carry sensors and weapons for the anti-submarine task, and an uncrewed aircraft flying from an escort carries obvious attractions, since it can stay airborne longer than a crewed helicopter, costs less to operate and risks no aircrew when it is sent into danger.
The shift is not without its difficulties, because a crewed maritime helicopter brings a skilled crew, a heavy and varied weapons load and the judgement to operate in the unforgiving conditions of the open ocean, and replacing all of that will depend on uncrewed rotorcraft maturing to the point where they can match it, taking off from and landing on a small, moving deck in poor weather and carrying enough capability to earn the space they occupy.
No date has been attached to the Wildcat’s departure from the sea in the way one has for the Army’s version.
Not sure I would be keen to do a troop transfer or a boarding operation in a “drone”.
Don’t they have a role in rescue and medevac as well or inserting SF?
Given their use for moving people, I could imagine these being optionally piloted, either remotely from the ship itself or from the helicopter itself.
Yet another defence cut dressed up as being hip & trendy.
Wonder how the Royals will fast rope onto ships
I wish Parliament was Unmanned.