Royal Navy's helicopter drone makes its first autonomous flight

The report describes the Royal Navy’s first flight of Proteus, a Leonardo-built autonomous full-size helicopter demonstrator based on the AW09, conducted at Predannack Airfield in Cornwall. Designed with a modular payload bay for roles such as ship-to-ship cargo delivery and deploying sonobuoys for anti-submarine warfare, Proteus is part of a £60M RWUAS effort and supports the UK MoD’s Atlantic Bastion strategy to augment limited crewed assets with autonomous systems. The brief, supervised autonomous flight marks a step toward a hybrid air wing alongside crewed platforms like Wildcat and Merlin; Proteus boasts a >1-ton payload but has no in-service date as it remains a demonstrator.