Photo credit: Dmytro/stock.adobe.com


“Te risk is that Britain measures its uncrewed ambition by the number of platforms it buys, rather than by how many can complete a mission in a drone- saturated battlespace”


Liam Hutcheson, UK director, MyDefence


But Ukraine was far from building its own systems en masse. Overall, Ukraine lacked sovereignty, but it was modifying Mavic software hundreds of times. Those efforts would eventually evolve into a Ukrainian “Shmavic” with different hardware. Meanwhile, the US sent a number of costly quadcopters that were seen as over-engineered and unreliable, but it was gaining a small-scale learning process “in contact”. Turkish Bayraktar drones helped stop the infamous Russian “traffic jam” north of Kyiv, until they were largely shot down. Ever since, there has been a sense that Ukrainians led the way and Britain was absent or too slow, in terms of vision and ossified defence bureaucracy, to keep up. But this is not the whole story.


Britain’s unsung drone heroes Two years before the war, a flurry of activity was already taking place.


14 Advance | Autumn 2026


In December 2020, Windracers - a


UK start-up - flew medical supplies by twin-prop drone to the Isles of Scilly using UK flight-control software. Heavy-lift drone company Malloy


Aeronautics saw its drones trialled by the Royal Navy, moving 180kg loads, while UK start-up Prismatic trialled its high-altitude PHASA solar-powered drone for 72 hours in simulated stratospheric conditions. Bedford-based Blue Bear


demonstrated drone swarming beyond-visual-line-of-sight, while, for long endurance, Chieveley-based ISS Aerospace flew a heavy-lift drone carrying an 8kg payload for 100 minutes using a new hydrogen fuel cell made by Loughborough-based Intelligent Energy. In one year, under peacetime conditions and during a global pandemic, UK innovation surged ahead. This is not to downplay Ukraine’s


innovation. Ukraine learned how to constantly iterate first-person-view


OPINION


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