A crisis is erupting in the Arctic Sea. A fleet of Royal Navy warships is steaming north. Then, off the coast of Norway, intelligence suggests enemy vessels could be lurking ahead. Perhaps even submarines preparing to fire torpedoes.
The aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth II and her flotilla need helicopters to check the ocean for threats. But those surveillance missions could be dangerous for crews and place more demands on them while they are overstretched.
Fortunately, several Proteus aircraft are on the flagship’s flight deck. They look just like conventional helicopters – but they are entirely autonomous, piloted solely by AI.
After receiving tasks from officers, they take off, drop sonar buoys to listen for subs, and use cameras to assess whether surface ships are hostile. All without any further human interaction.
This was the scenario recently shown to The i Paper in a simulation room at the Leonardo helicopter factory in the Somerset town of Yeovil, where the Proteus has been developed.
These tensions in the North Sea are imaginary, but the unmanned aircraft is not. The Proteus flew for the first time last month in Cornwall, with onboard computers controlling its launch and its landing.
It is a symbol of how war is changing. The Royal Navy envisions autonomous helicopters like this flying “side-by-side with crewed aircraft in a future “hybrid air wing” and potentially at the heart of future anti-submarine operations”.
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For now, there is just one Proteus and it is simply an experimental model, funded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to learn and demonstrate how such aircraft could work in future.
Leonardo hopes that it shows the Government why the Yeovil factory is worth saving, after the firm’s CEO warned the plant could close if his firm does not receive a new order from the MoD for crewed AW-149 helicopters imminently.
There were conflicting reports on Friday about whether or not the deal will go ahead.
Being awarded the £1bn contract to build AW-149s “would allow us to retain skillsets and engineers on site in order to build things like Proteus”, says Adam Wardrope, Leonardo’s vice president for market development.
If it remains open, the team at Leonardo are confident that Yeovil could be supplying uncrewed helicopters like Proteus to the navy in little more than a decade.
Wardrope makes clear that Proetus is not just a drone because it is smarter and more complex than that.
Although they expect early versions to carry out surveillance and logistical missions, one day such machines will probably be armed.
Fewer pilots’ lives should be put at risk but the team acknowledge that important ethical questions lie ahead, as humans begin making fewer decisions about what their weapons do and when.
Wardrope will not speculate on the cost of turning Proteus into an operational aircraft (Photo: Graham Trott)How Proteus would listen for submarines and monitor ships
As we inspect the prototype, Wardrope explains that an operational version would have to be larger, to ensure it could work “in the North Sea on a dark night in high winds and poor weather”.
“It won’t look like this, it’ll be a different shape,” he says. “When you put fuel in it, then put equipment in it, and all the sensory equipment, it naturally becomes a certain size.”
Besides flying independently – with its speed, direction and altitude all controlled by its computers – an aircraft like this would make important decisions by itself about how to carry out its pre-set mission.
In the Norway simulation playing on factory screens, one Proteus is told by a human commander to deploy sonar buoys. But it is the onboard system that decides where to position these, knowing not to drop them through the roof of an unsuspecting tourist boat nor to approach oil rigs.
Once the buoys are in the water, the aircraft’s AI compares any sounds it picks up to recordings of different types of vessels and their engines. It only alerts the crew back on its mothership if it believes it can hear a submarine. If it does not hear anything, there is no need for it to bother them.
The prototype of the Proteus. An operational version would need to be much bigger (Photo: Graham Trott)Another Proteus in this scenario has been given a specific area of ocean to patrol, and proceeds to fly towards every ship within the oval perimeter on its map. Its system identifies vessels according to their size and shape, using an algorithm created from a database of 150,000 photos of different craft seen in varying light.
If it is 95 per cent sure a ship is a pleasure boat, it will not raise the alarm, but if it thinks it has found an enemy warship, it will warn the fleet. A human will check the result and consider what to do next.
The computer also decides when the Proteus should fly back, assessing the weather conditions and its fuel levels.
The idea is for autonomous aircraft to carry out “dull, dangerous, dirty tasks”, Wardrope explains. The Leonardo team believe it could replace traditional airborne early warning and control aircraft in certain situations.
The RAF’s Boeing E-7 Wedgetail, for example, which is fitted with a distinctive radar fin along the top of its fuselage, requires two pilots and 10 crew. It can only take off from a land-based runway. Perhaps a squadron of 20 Proteus-like helicopters could be sent out instead, with a single person overseeing the radar, camera and radio results being beamed back.
Besides eliminating the cost of training and employing pilots, aircraft production should be cheaper, too. “You don’t need to make it crash-worthy when it lands, you don’t need to put floatation gear in so that it doesn’t sink,” says Wardrope.
Leonardo suggests that squadrons of autonomous helicopters like Proteus replace early warning aircraft like the E7 in some situations (Photo: Jason McCawley/Getty)Questions over cost and complexity
Developing Proteus from scratch took four years and cost £60m. It is a landmark for British technology – but it is far from a world first. A helicopter landed autonomously on an American ship a full two decades ago.
The shortcomings of similar machines abroad may serve as a warning. The US Navy began using the Northrop Grumman MQ-8 Fire Scout in 2019 and intended to buy 177. But only 38 of them were built, fewer than half of those became operational, and in 2024, the latest version was retired altogether.
US Navy Commander Ian Adam told the publication Flight Global that smaller drones had developed so quickly that they were now able to perform the same jobs far more cheaply.
The UK defence industry is often criticised for focusing on “exquisite” machines – highly complex designs that can perform many roles but are very expensive and require lots of maintenance – rather than developing simpler, cheaper contraptions that might look less impressive but are more practical and easier to maintain, update or replace, especially while at war.
Is there a risk that the Proteus becomes just another example of this?
The MQ-8 Fire Scout which has been mothballed by the US Navy (Photo: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty)Suggesting that larger helicopters – whether they are piloted by humans or AI – could all be replaced with smaller drones is “ridiculous” and “frustrating,” says Ben Clarke, who has worked at the factory for two decades and is now a Unite union representative at Yeovil. “You can’t even compare the two things… It’s night and day.”
“Anyone could strap a grenade to a drone from Amazon and fly into something,” he says. But when it comes to search-and-rescue missions in terrible weather at sea, for example, more powerful and advanced machines are needed.
The Royal Navy seems to agree. Last month, it said that it “operates several drones – including Malloy octocopters and Peregrine, a scaled-down helicopter which conducts surveillance duties – but Proteus eclipses them in terms of size, complexity and above all autonomy”.
Wardrope will not speculate on the cost of turning Proteus into an operational aircraft. But he accepts that technology is advancing, so the Navy must be able to upgrade any future version of Proteus quickly and easily.
Concerns about AI weapon systems have been growing, especially after Ukraine deployed drones that used machine learning to select which targets to destroy inside Russia last year. What if they hit civilian sites by mistake?
The UK’s ambassador to the UN, Barbara Woodward, has warned about the possibility of computers making decisions on when to use nuclear weapons in future.
The team at Yeovil accept there are “lots of questions of morality” ahead concerning how machines like Proteus are used, especially if they are eventually armed. For now, they argue, the UK cannot fall behind in tech battles today if it hopes to win military wars tomorrow.
@robhastings.bsky.social
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