MQ-9B SkyGuardian / SeaGuardian

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems built the MQ-9B as a successor to its long-serving MQ-9 Reaper, with one defining ambition: a large armed unmanned aircraft that could operate routinely in unsegregated civilian airspace alongside crewed traffic. First flown in 2016 and entering service from 2018, the SkyGuardian land-surveillance variant and its maritime sibling SeaGuardian carry a STANAG 4671 type certificate — the NATO airworthiness standard for unmanned systems — making the airframe the first of its class cleared to fly without the restricted-corridor workarounds that constrain the older Reaper. General Atomics markets the platform as Protector to the United Kingdom and as Sky/SeaGuardian to other customers.

The aircraft retains the basic Reaper planform — a 79-foot V-tail, single Honeywell TPE331 turboprop, payload pylons under each wing — but adds lightning protection, de-icing systems, a redundant flight-control architecture, and an automatic take-off and landing capability that lets a single ground crew handle the airframe from any compatible strip. Endurance exceeds 40 hours, considerably longer than the Reaper, and the platform supports a mix of Hellfire missiles, Brimstone, Paveway IV laser-guided bombs (the UK weapons fit), and the standard MQ-9 sensor suite including the Lynx synthetic-aperture radar and the Multi-Spectral Targeting System. SeaGuardian swaps the underbelly EO/IR turret for a 360-degree Raytheon Seaspray maritime search radar and adds an AIS receiver and a sonobuoy dispenser pod, turning the airframe into a long-loiter anti-submarine and surface-search asset.

The United Kingdom is the lead operator, with a £1.3 billion order for sixteen Protector RG Mk1 aircraft for the Royal Air Force, the first of which were delivered to RAF Waddington in 2023. Belgium ordered four airframes the same year. India signed for thirty-one MQ-9B in 2024 in a deal worth roughly 3.5 billion dollars — fifteen SeaGuardians for the navy and eight SkyGuardians each for the army and air force — making it the largest single export of the type to date. The United States Air Force and Marine Corps both fly small numbers for trials, and the Japan Coast Guard has leased SeaGuardians for maritime patrol around the Senkaku island chain.

General Atomics has continued to iterate the platform with optional short-takeoff wing kits, a podded electronic-warfare suite, and a teaming concept that pairs the MQ-9B with the company’s smaller Gambit collaborative combat aircraft. Where the Reaper was designed for permissive counter-insurgency airspace, SkyGuardian and SeaGuardian aim at the harder problem of persistent surveillance over Europe and the western Pacific — operating from the same airfields, under the same air-traffic rules, as the crewed fleets they support.