The British Army bought more than 10,000 drones in the past year through Project Rapstone, its fast-track procurement program, and most of them will never see a battlefield. Lt. Col. Matt Keogh, a commander involved in the program, gave the figure at a UK defense industry exhibition earlier in September and told Business Insider the drones are for training.
The training itself is the story. Rapstone soldiers learn to fly first-person-view drones by hand, with no flight aids and no GPS, before they get anywhere near the automated systems that most of the fleet runs on. Keogh calls it “the hardest way to fly,” and the Army does it on purpose.
An army that spends on 10,000 aircraft usually plans to fight with them. Rapstone plans to wear most of these out on training grounds.
Rapstone Spends On Pilots Because The Drones Go Obsolete In Weeks
Rapstone deliberately avoids buying large numbers of the newest drones, Keogh said, because drone tactics and hardware in Ukraine have turned over so fast that a product can be obsolete within weeks or months. The program spends on pilots instead, and buys cheap, fully manual FPV aircraft to train them on.
Britain launched Rapstone in September 2024 to get new gear to soldiers faster, a start date that comes from Business Insider’s reporting: the Ministry of Defence’s own Rapstone pages describe the program without dating it. The MoD now describes it as the program meant to move equipment from industry to the front line within 24 months and double the Army’s fighting power by 2027. The September 16 announcement of 245 sub-250 g FOXE-NATO drones, 110 Sonora training drones and a fleet of Skydio X10 aircraft under a £16 million ($21 million) deal sits inside it, and the £5 billion drone package announced in June put another £50 million ($67 million) into Rapstone over 12 months for FPV and interceptor drones. Britain also committed to 100,000 drones for Ukraine by April 2026, so this is the second ten-thousand-drone number out of London in 15 months.
Keogh said Britain was training pilots on surveillance-type drones “way before Ukraine,” and thousands of soldiers have come through Rapstone training. Most of them flew intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, the kind Western armies have used for years, rather than the FPV attack quadcopters Ukraine made famous. The manual-first rule reaches those ISR drones too: Keogh described stripping safeguards out of the smaller ISR platforms so pilots cannot lean on them.
FPV Training Takes 30 Simulator Hours Before A Two-Week Course
The entry requirement for the Army’s FPV course is experience flying ISR drones, Keogh said. Candidates then log 30 hours in a simulator before a two-week operator course, with an optional two-week commander course after that. Every soldier in the pipeline gets a kit of drones, a controller, goggles and batteries worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Keogh said the overlap between simulator and real aircraft is large enough that a pilot with 30 simulator hours picks up the real thing straight away. That matches what the US Army built into its Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course, which loads simulator time in front of the first live flight, and what Bulgaria did last November when it ordered simulators into every land forces formation. The British version differs in what the simulator teaches. The Army wants the pilot to learn manual control the way a driver learns a stick shift before an automatic, or a map and compass before GPS, in Keogh’s comparison, so that whatever drone shows up at the front, the hard part is already trained.
GPS-Denied Training Means Reading A Map From The Video Feed
Britain trains FPV pilots for jammed airspace by sending them on long flights across training grounds, beyond visual line of sight, with no satellite positioning to fall back on. Pilot and commander navigate by matching what the camera feed shows to a paper map, Keogh said. Navigation, he added, is one of the biggest problems FPV pilots face.
The Ukrainian battlefield is the reason. Russian electronic warfare there jams and spoofs GPS across whole sectors, and NATO armies watching the war are building the same conditions into their own courses. Britain is one of them, and it has been public about treating Ukraine as the preview: the drone strategy it laid out at DSEI 2025 and the drone-warfare degree that starts its first cohort this month are built on the same reading of that war.
DroneXL’s Take
The consumer drone industry has spent a decade removing the need to fly, and the British Army is paying to put it back. Every DJI update since the Phantom has taken a skill away from the pilot: position hold, obstacle avoidance, return-to-home, a gimbal that levels itself. That is exactly right for a real estate shoot. It is exactly wrong for a soldier whose GPS is being jammed, because the day the assists fail is the day the pilot finds out whether he can fly. Rapstone’s answer, 30 simulator hours of pure manual stick time before anyone touches an aircraft, is the cheapest training a military can buy, and I’d argue it is also the cheapest training a Part 107 pilot can buy. If you have only ever flown with every assist on, you have never flown the drone. A $20 FPV simulator and a used radio will tell you within an hour how much of your skill was the software’s.
Source: Business Insider, UK Ministry of Defence
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
