Iran conflict fires up demand for new generation of remote-controlled weaponry

Since war erupted in Iran, Jon Parker, the boss of British drone maker Flyby, has rarely enjoyed a quiet moment. During our short conversation at its headquarters, the former RAF fighter jet pilot receives three phone calls from, he says, states eager to get their hands on his Jackal war-fighting aircraft.

Although the drones, which are designed in York, are so new that the first was only delivered to the air force this month, Parker says: ‘Our phones are ringing off the hook.’

The unmanned planes, which take off and land vertically, can fly deep behind enemy lines, unleashing supersonic missiles ‘at range, unseen and unheard’.

Flyby is among five firms investing £1 billion in a cluster of drone factories in Swindon with the aim of creating 1,200 jobs as demand booms.

While it already makes drones at a factory in Turkey, Flyby is now building a £200 million facility at Swindon’s old Honda car factory, which closed in 2021.

Another £5 million will be spent on a testing site and £30 million on tripling its workforce to 300.

The factory is scheduled to open by the end of the year and plans to produce 2,000 drones annually.

Parker, 62, said: ‘The UK needs to plan its industrial base now. We need a Lord Beaverbrook to coordinate. We can’t do it with a committee,’ he says, referring to the former British press baron who led Britain’s defence procurement during the Second World War.

Flyby’s drones are focused on providing ‘close air support’ to soldiers and disrupting operations behind enemy lines.

Jackal, its first unmanned aircraft, can launch two supersonic missiles while hovering, and has a range of 93 miles with a maximum speed of 172mph.

A jet-powered model, called Havoc, which has a range of 250 miles and can reach speeds of 552mph, is being tested by Humber Rescue as a civilian lifesaving vehicle.

In combat, both will be able to fire supersonic weapons designed to hit vehicles on the move including helicopters and Iran’s infamous Shahed drones.

Parker, whose business partners include ex-RAF air vice-marshal Peter ‘Rocky’ Rochelle, likens the aircraft to ‘an Apache attack helicopter with no crew’.

While the £1.2 million price tag for a fully kitted Jackal isn’t exactly cheap, it is much less than the £40 million unit cost commanded by the Apache.

But the largest investment in Swindon, famous for railways and the legendary Spitfire fighter plane, is from Portuguese company Tekever. It is creating 1,000 jobs at a £400 million, 254,000 square foot factory in Sir Norman Foster’s listed Spectrum Building, built for carmaker Renault and which featured in the 1984 James Bond film, A View to a Kill.

Tekever set up a British office in Southampton in 2013 and ten years later opened a small factory in Aberporth in Wales that makes its AR3 and AR5 unmanned planes.

The company, supported by NATO’s investment fund and the UK government’s strategic investment fund, hopes to move into the Spectrum Building in the summer and become Britain’s largest drone factory.

The aircraft, which can have up to eight-metre wingspans and a range of 142 miles, have been used in Ukraine and as part of the RAF’s Storm Shroud initiative to confuse enemy radar systems.

Standing in the vast empty space beneath Foster’s Meccano-esque steelwork, Scott McClelland, Tekever’s UK corporate director, says: ‘This facility will manufacture everything from modules and 3D-printed sections to the finished product.’

The former civil servant says its focus is defence against Russia, for which there are ‘record levels of European spending’.

Two more drone suppliers to Ukraine are also setting up in Swindon – German firm Stark, which is creating 100 jobs, and US company Neros.

Stark, established in 2024, is the first firm to have started production at Swindon. Mike Armstrong, UK managing director, said: ‘We made a low-risk investment to pre-emptively set up the factory.’

The company, which has staff in Germany and Ukraine, and is backed by the PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, has created 100 jobs in Swindon.

Its Virtus vertical take-off and landing drones can carry a payload 62 miles for deep strikes at a fraction of the cost of a missile or risk of a manned plane.

Stark is developing another autonomous aircraft which can travel over 900 miles meaning it can be launched from a different country or continent – or even a ship many miles out at sea.

Fellow Ukraine supplier Neros makes single-use battlefield strike drones that can hold a three-kilogramme bomb and are small enough to be carried by a soldier.

The 90mph aircraft, which have a range of over 15 miles, are so precise they can be flown through a window into a building before being detonated. A single Ukrainian army unit can use 150 in a day.

Former Grenadier Guards officer Hugo Crawford, who heads the UK team at Neros, notes that at £1,000 a pop, the drones are much cheaper than the £120,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles he used while serving in Iraq, despite having a range five times longer.

‘In warfare economics, it makes logical sense,’ he says, adding that more countries need to consider their ability to produce drones, which since the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the Middle East have become the face of modern battle.

‘Any country which can’t make its own drones is a vassal state,’ Crawford says.

The final new arrival is Munin Dynamics, a ‘cutting-edge’ venture that is run by a former Norwegian special forces soldier, Magnus Freyer. It has set up in Swindon to produce systems designed to protect soldiers against drones.

Publicity-shy boss Freyer is tight-lipped about details, saying that he prefers operating ‘below the radar’.

Also arriving are several supply companies including Icomat, which makes aircraft composite modules and has initial plans to create 80 jobs.

Interest in drone manufacturing has been piqued after the Government’s latest strategic defence review announced that 40 per cent of future military vehicles should be unmanned.

Amid the rush, local MP Will Stone, a former army rifleman, tells me that talks are under way, with five more firms considering bases in the Wiltshire town – three Canadian, one Danish and a Spanish company.

The Labour politician has been championing Swindon for its industrial history and geographical position close to defence sites in a bid to attract more companies and ‘reindustrialise’ Swindon.

He has been passionately promoting the town’s attributes to defence firms on social media, noting that it was a post on his LinkedIn page which first grabbed the attention of Flyby’s boss.

Stone said: ‘It brings some pride to the town that we’re supporting the nation’s security’.