UK orders Skyhammer drone interceptors from Cambridge Aerospace

Britain’s Ministry of Defence announced on Friday that it has contracted Cambridge Aerospace to supply a significant quantity of Skyhammer drone interceptors, with the first deliveries scheduled to begin in May and the full order to be fulfilled within six months.

Defence Secretary John Healey made the announcement in a speech on April 10, 2026, marking one of the fastest procurement timelines for a domestically developed weapons system in recent British defence history.

Cambridge Aerospace, founded in late 2024 and headquartered in Cambridge, was established with the explicit goal of producing advanced air defence systems at a fraction of the cost of traditional interceptor programs. The company started development of Skyhammer in January 2025 and completed initial flight testing within six weeks — a development tempo that stands in stark contrast to programs that typically take years to move from concept to operational prototype.

Since those first flights, the company has conducted iterative testing on a weekly basis. Recent trials delivered consistent successful interceptions of Shahed-style drones across a range of conditions, with the autonomous platform autonomously identifying, tracking and neutralising the target without direct human guidance at the point of engagement. The company now employs more than 125 people in highly skilled roles across the United Kingdom, with a growing presence across Europe. A second production facility is currently undergoing final fit-out to accelerate manufacturing output.

Defence Secretary Healey framed the purchase as part of a broader government strategy to fast-track contracts with innovative British companies. “We are applying the approach for UK support to Ukraine and accelerating contracts with the most innovative British businesses to rapidly expand support to Gulf partners and equip our own forces with anti-drone tech,” he said. “Our government backing for Cambridge Aerospace is a prime case of a veteran-founded UK defence start-up scaling at pace to deliver new interceptor missiles within weeks for our Armed Forces and Gulf partners, and good jobs and security here in the UK.”

Steven Barrett, the company’s chief executive officer, said the procurement validated the company’s core mission. “With aerial threats to the UK and our allies increasing by the day, it is critical that we can defend ourselves effectively,” Barrett said. “Skyhammer was designed to do exactly that — bringing affordable mass to protect our skies. We welcome the Government’s commitment to supporting UK air defence with scalable, sovereign solutions.”

Skyhammer is a tube-launched, high-subsonic interceptor powered by a turbojet engine. It weighs approximately 18 kilograms, measures under one metre in length with a wingspan of 1.3 metres, and reaches a top speed of 700 kilometres per hour — roughly Mach 0.7. The system carries an X-band radar seeker in its forward section, enabling all-weather autonomous target acquisition. Behind the seeker sits a blast-fragmentation warhead engineered to defeat targets ranging from one-way attack drones of the Shahed class to subsonic cruise missiles. With a range exceeding 30 kilometres, Skyhammer can be pre-positioned around a defended site and launched within seconds of threat detection. Its tube-launched configuration allows it to be mounted on fixed installations or mobile platforms, giving commanders operational flexibility across a variety of force postures.

The interceptor’s folding semi-wings and inverted-V tail surfaces lie forward along the fuselage during storage, deploying upon launch — a design that reduces the footprint required for stockpiling large numbers of rounds.

The drone threat that Skyhammer is designed to counter has grown substantially in operational relevance over the past three years. Iranian-supplied Shahed-136 loitering munitions have been used extensively in the conflict in Ukraine, typically deployed in coordinated waves intended to overwhelm point defences and expose higher-value air defence assets to follow-on strikes. Similar one-way attack drones have been employed across the Middle East, as referenced by Defence Secretary Healey’s mention of Gulf partners in Thursday’s announcement. NATO member states have struggled to respond cost-effectively to the threat: intercepting a drone costing several thousand dollars with a missile valued in the hundreds of thousands represents an economically unsustainable exchange ratio at scale. Skyhammer’s design philosophy — autonomous, radar-guided, and priced in the tens of thousands of dollars — is explicitly calibrated to close that gap.

Cambridge Aerospace says its second production facility, currently undergoing final outfitting, will substantially increase throughput beyond its current capacity in the low hundreds of units annually, with a stated ambition to scale to thousands of rounds per year.