The UK’s military aviation authority has granted a Military Type Certificate (MTC) for the Royal Air Force Protector RG Mk1 unarmed aerial vehicle after a rigorous assessment process to prove its airworthiness and operational effectiveness.
Also know as the MQ-9B, the RAF Protector Mk1 can now operate without geographic restrictions and the certification is the first of its kind for a large remote piloted vehicle.
General Atomics Aeronautical, which manufactures the platform, has long held the aim of gaining a UK MTC for the platform since the inception of the MQ-9B programme in 2014.
It built the MQ-9B on the proven MQ-9A platform and added performance and operational enhancements to meet the NATO’s STANAG 4671 Edition 2 airworthiness requirements.
“Earning an MTC for MQ-9B was a herculean effort and a seminal achievement for our company,” said GA-ASI CEO Linden Blue. “We invested over $500 million as part of an 11-year effort to develop an unmanned aircraft that meets NATO’s rigorous airworthiness standards. This included three flight test aircraft, full component and system-level environmental testing to Do-160 and Mil-Standards (system level environmental testing at Elgin and Pax River), full scale static test airframe test to ultimate ground and flight loads, bird strike, hail protection and full-scale fatigue testing to three lifetimes (3x 40,000 notional aircraft flight hours = 120,000 hours total). Our engineers developed over 140,000 pages of detailed technical data verifying that the MQ-9B met those demanding requirements. I congratulate our team for this outstanding accomplishment, and I know our customers need this type certification, which will open civil airspace for their flight operations.”
The RAF has already taken delivery of 10 of the 16 Protector RG Mk1’s that the Ministry off Defence (MoD) has ordered and they are operated from RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire.
