BRITAIN’S longest-running aircraft factory has built it all – from Spitfires and Seafire planes to the Sea King, Lynx and Merlin helicopters.
But now a crack team of engineers at the Leonardo facility in Yeovil, Somerset, are working on the next big revolution: a helicopter that flies itself.
The Proteus demonstrator drone – believed to be a world-first – is being developed by the company on behalf of the Royal Navy, with test flights expected to take place later this year.
It is roughly the size of a transit van but has no cabin. Nor will it be remotely piloted, like other drones used by the military. Instead, Proteus will use a combination of computer software with an array of cameras and sensors to autonomously take off, land and carry out its missions.
To begin with, this will mean assisting with tracking Russian submarine activity in the North Sea.
But the drone’s Thunderbird 2-style “modular mission bay” means it could eventually be used for a wide variety of tasks, both military and civilian, from intelligence-gathering and cargo transportation to even tackling forest fires.
“Proteus will do what we call the ‘dull and dangerous’ stuff that you don’t want to use people for if you can help it,”
explains Nigel Colman, managing director of Leonardo Helicopters UK.
“You won’t have to put people’s lives at risk. You won’t have to be limited by food rations or, quite frankly, the size of your bladder. It provides mass, reduced cost of ownership and reduced workforce requirements, so it’s tackling all those challenges that the Navy faces with crewed aircraft.”
Colman was a navigator for the RAF for 30 years, serving in the cockpits of Merlins, Wildcats and Pumas during deployments to the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Northern Ireland. He is keen to stress that Proteus isn’t meant to replace crewed platforms completely, but rather free them up for the most critical jobs.
For example, the first task it has been designed for is anti-submarine warfare in conjunction with Navy ships and helicopters out in the North Sea. This would see one or more Proteus drones equipped with “sonobuoys” – highly sensitive sonar devices that listen for propeller and engine sounds underwater – drop the devices into the water to triangulate an enemy’s position.
The drones, potentially working with a crewed Merlin, would be capable of processing the data themselves and transmitting it back to a nearby Navy vessel.
Onboard software allows them to avoid no-fly zones and oil rigs, identify commercial vessels or fishing boats, and recognise their Navy “mothership”. They will be able to fly continuously for about 10 hours, according to Leonardo.
Rather than remotely controlling them with a joystick, however, forces personnel will instead give the drones instructions – potentially using just a tablet computer – with the machine then plotting its own course and carrying out the tasks independently.
This can be tricky work in harsh weather. Among other things, the robot will need to master tasks such as landing on a vessel that is pitching and heaving on the waves. The idea is to reduce the number of hours sailors spend on time-consuming tasks.
Normally, flying a Merlin helicopter from an aircraft carrier or frigate to drop sonobuoys in a nearby section of ocean can take a human crew several hours – much of which is spent uneventfully cruising over water.
In future, it means someone could give Proteus a task and then leave to make themselves a cup of coffee without having to worry about constantly supervising the machine.
“We’re designing it to be as autonomous as possible, so the operator really only has to intervene when they really need to,”
says Phil Bartlett, head of future programmes at Leonardo UK, a subsidiary of the Italian defence giant. Bartlett’s team is the company’s equivalent of Q-branch, set up in 2022 to lead the Proteus programme and investigate emerging rotary wing technologies.
Their demonstrator is being put together in record time under a new type of government contract designed to speed up innovation. Designs were only finalised in 2023, with the demonstrator drone now almost complete and flight tests due to commence within months. This is practically warp speed when compared to conventional military programmes.
“If you think about where we’ve come from, to go from a design to build in not even two years – that’s a massive change to how we normally do things,”
says Rob Girling, the experimental operations manager.
“These 20-year development programmes, you just can’t have them any more. By the time you’ve finished things are already obsolete. So we’ve got to move quicker.”
Their team is adding to a rich seam of history in Yeovil. The factory – previously known as Westland Helicopters – opened in 1915 under the Petters family and went on to make Sopwith 1½ Strutters and de Havilland 4 and 9 bombers in the First World War. During the Second World War, it was one of several factories to produce Spitfire and Seafire fighters. But since then, Yeovil has emerged as “the home of British helicopters” producing syndicated designs such as the Dragonfly, the Sea King and the Apache as well as collaborations such as the Puma, Gazelle and Lynx.
Colman hopes the site – which employs some 3,000 workers – will make Proteus drones along with crewed AW149 battlefield helicopters. Leonardo has put forward the AW149 for the Ministry of Defence’s new medium helicopter contract and is now the last bidder standing after Airbus and Sikorsky withdrew.
In comparison, Proteus is for now confined to a four-year, £60m demonstrator contract awarded to Leonardo in 2022. But if successful, the aircraft could become part of a new generation of “attritable” – low-cost and reusable – drones that the Ministry of Defence wants to rush into service, providing desperately needed ballast to Britain’s Armed Forces at a time when Europe is rushing to rearm.
“You’re going to have more exquisite, expensive platforms that you need to protect,” explains Andy Bennett, programme manager at Leonardo. “Then you’ll have attritable platforms, which may be equipped with expensive sensor suites, and at the bottom you’ll have your ‘disposable’ stuff. That’s the model the Armed Forces are shifting towards.
“Proteus will sit somewhere in the attritable space, maybe towards the higher end depending on the payload it’s carrying.”
As has been shown by the Ukraine conflict, the lack of human occupants in drones is likely to change the way war is waged in future, Bennett says.
Source: The Sunday Telegraph