Best-in-class military unmanned aerial system joint venture between Skyeton International and Prevail Partners brings SME agility, cost-effectiveness and ready-now capability to UK defence requirements
- The partnership between Skyeton and Prevail combines Ukrainian drone innovation with British expertise in battlefield integration to scale up volume manufacturing
- The joint venture’s Raybird system answers the Strategic Defence Review’s desire to use innovative SMEs to help deliver agile, cost-effective and ready-now capability for UK defence needs
- New UK/Ukraine joint venture reflects Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Sir Keir Starmer’s drone collaboration ambition, with endorsement from Sir Iain Duncan Smith
- Raybird is a battle-hardened, multi-role, unmanned aerial system with over 350,000 combat hours delivering best-in-class performance 28-hour endurance, 25-minute deployment time and operational altitudes of up to 10,000m
- New UK-based manufacturing of Raybird will create 160 skilled jobs
Today, Skyeton – a Ukrainian unmanned aircraft systems company with 19 years of engineering pedigree, and Prevail Partners – a leading UK defence and security company, announced a joint venture to fast-track the volume manufacture, supply and support for the integration of its best-in-class drone into UK military applications.
At the heart of the joint venture is Skyeton’s battle-proven Raybird, which has flown thousands of hours in Ukraine with extremely low attrition rates and outstanding operational performance due to its extensive list of best-in-class capabilities.
As such, Raybird is emblematic of the intersection of Ukrainian battle-proven ingenuity with the ambition to bring a new generation of challenger SMEs into the UK procurement process – increasing the speed while reducing the cost of delivering technology that matches today’s evolving threat landscape. This desire was explicit in the recently published Strategic Defence Review, that proposed a UK Drone Centre and was given additional impetus on Monday, June 23 by Sir Keir Starmer and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s accord that would bring together the best of UK and Ukrainian capabilities to fast-track this particular technology class.
The Rt Hon Sir Iain Duncan Smith who has first-hand insight into Skyeton’s operations said, “This joint venture is an important step in developing Britain’s long-range drone manufacturing capabilities. I recently visited Skyeton’s impressive facilities in Ukraine and saw first-hand its world-class engineers and battlefield-tested technologies and processes, making it one of the top dual-use drone manufacturers globally.”
He continued, “Skyeton’s JV with Prevail’s strategic, operational and intelligence capabilities will help put Britain at the forefront of drone technology and production, tapping into our world-class talented pool of engineers, universities and R&D centres, creating employment and upskilling opportunities.”
The Raybird design as a NATO Class 1 UAS provides for a tool-free payload hot swap with multiple applications, including a gimbal-stabilised camera with unmatched target acquisition capability, a high resolution reconnaissance camera, a synthetic aperture radar for landscape image generation in darkness or bad weather and a radio frequency locator. Raybird is favoured by combat troops due to its mission success, resilience and minimal risk for operators in the field as the entire system is highly mobile and quick to deploy in under 25 minutes.
The full suite of modular applications, their flexible deployment and the class-leading performance has made Raybird one of the most effective unmanned aerial systems in the Russia-Ukraine war; hundreds of Raybirds have been deployed in the region, recording more than 350,000 flight hours. Skyeton estimates that the platform has been responsible for the attrition of billions of dollars of enemy hardware, with extremely low aircraft losses.
The joint venture will scale the availability of Raybird with new manufacturing in the UK for both deployment in Ukraine and provide the necessary integration expertise from Prevail Partners for UK and other western militaries seeking highly adaptable, multi-purpose and cost-effective unmanned aerial capabilities as part of their defence portfolio.
Justin Hedges, OBE, Chairman of Prevail Partners said, “Prevail has been present in Ukraine since before the Russian invasion and over that time, we’ve witnessed the exceptional innovation of UAS technology. We identified Raybird as a world-leading aircraft with capabilities well beyond those of other Class 1 UAS; as a result, we made the decision to seek a joint venture with Skyeton to build Raybird in the UK, help develop its integration into the UK’s and NATO’s battlefield operations and maritime security and thereby answer some of the challenges that the Strategic Defence Review presented.”
Pavlo Shevchuk, International CEO at Skyeton, added, “Raybird has been incredibly effective under the most demanding conditions on the Ukrainian battlefield. By forming an alliance with a respected British company, bringing experience in platform integration and systems deployment, we expect the utility of our unmanned aerial system to grow globally and exponentially.”
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