UK’s Urgent new Reaper UAV's delayed | The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

UK’s new Reaper drones remain grounded, months before Afghan withdrawal | The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

The expansion of Britain’s armed drone fleet has been in the works a long time: in December 2010 David Cameron announced a plan to double the UK’s Reaper capacity, including the purchase of five new aircraft and three ground control stations. Reaper is produced by US defence company General Atomics.  But the manufacturing was delayed because the demands of the US Air Force, which was ordering multiple additional Reapers of its own, took precedence over the British order, a defence spokesman told the Bureau.
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The new Reapers were expected to be operational by 2013, but have also suffered hardware and software setbacks.
The aircraft completed their testing phase in the US by February, and have now been delivered to Afghanistan. There, they are being rebuilt and tested, and are expected to start flying missions in the ‘near future’, an MoD spokesman told the Bureau.
‘A late notice engineering change to the new production aircraft did delay the completion of acceptance testing. That work is now complete and delivery of the five new aircraft to the UK MOD is complete,’ the spokesman added.
The UK’s drone fleet has been further hampered by one of its five operational Reapers recently being out of action for ‘corrective maintenance’. This was originally revealed to campaign group Drone Wars UK in a Freedom of Information response issued in March.
A defence spokesman told the Bureau the US Air Force has loaned the RAF one of its Reapers to cover the shortfall.