Hunting a modern submarine is one of the most demanding tasks in military aviation. It means hours of patient, fuel-hungry orbits over empty ocean, listening for a contact that may never appear. It is precisely the kind of dull, exhausting, unglamorous work that machines are built for — and on 26 June 2026, two of the world’s aerospace heavyweights agreed to build one.

Airbus and Kawasaki Heavy Industries signed a memorandum of understanding to study an anti-submarine and maritime-patrol version of the European-built Eurodrone. The idea, tailored to Japan’s defence needs, is to take a large reconnaissance drone and teach it to find and kill submarines.

It is a notable pairing: a European unmanned aircraft, reshaped by a Japanese manufacturer, for a mission dominated until now by large crewed jets.

The aircraft underneath

The Eurodrone — formally the U950 — is Europe’s answer to the American MQ-9 Reaper, but a markedly bigger one. It is roughly 5–6 metres longer and wider than the Reaper and carries more than double the maximum take-off weight. Two turboprop engines, rather than the Reaper’s single engine, sit at the heart of a long-running argument about the design.

Germany insisted on that second engine so the drone could fly safely over populated areas. Critics called it dead weight and added cost. For a maritime mission, though, the calculus flips: an engine failure 1,500 kilometres out over the Pacific is survivable on two engines and fatal on one. Redundancy that looked like a liability over land becomes a virtue over water.

The programme’s launch customers are Germany (21 aircraft), Italy (15), France and Spain (12 each), with Airbus as lead contractor alongside Leonardo and Dassault. First flight is scheduled for 2029. Japan has held partner status since November 2023, but has not yet committed to an order.

From spy drone to submarine hunter

Turning a surveillance platform into an ASW aircraft is not a paint job. Engineers will have to integrate sonobuoys — the small sonar sensors dropped into the sea to listen for submarines — along with the processing to make sense of them, and the ability to carry lightweight torpedoes. With an endurance of up to 40 hours, the airframe itself is well suited to the patient geometry of a submarine search.

The most interesting line in Kawasaki’s announcement is about teaming. The maritime Eurodrone is not meant to replace the crewed Kawasaki P-1; it is meant to fly with it — a manned-unmanned partnership in which the drone widens the search area while the P-1’s crew prosecutes the contacts that matter. It is the same logic now reshaping surface and subsurface warfare: the expensive, crewed platform becomes the tip of a much larger, cheaper, partly-automated spear.

Why the timing makes sense

Japan has reason to want this. It patrols enormous stretches of the Pacific and sits beside a Chinese submarine fleet that grows every year. It already operates dozens of P-1 and P-3 Orion patrol aircraft and is fielding RQ-4B Global Hawks for long-range surveillance — but the Global Hawk carries no weapons and cannot hunt submarines at all. An armed, long-endurance drone fills exactly that gap.

For now this is a study, not a sale. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: the lonely, exhausting business of submarine hunting is about to get a tireless new partner that never needs to sleep.

Sources: The Aviationist; Kawasaki Heavy Industries; FlightGlobal.