When the Royal Air Force retired its last Reaper in the autumn of 2025, it did so with a gap in the middle of its capability. The replacement was already flying — the Protector RG Mk 1, sixteen of them on order — but it could not yet legally drop or fire anything.

At Farnborough on Monday, General Atomics announced that the gap has closed. Weapons qualification testing for the Paveway IV guided bomb and the Brimstone 3 missile was completed on 18 June, in Southern California, after a programme of work that has run for roughly six years across two governments and several companies.

It is a less dramatic milestone than it sounds, and a more important one.

What "weapons qualification" actually means

This is not the RAF announcing that it has started bombing things with Protector. It is an airworthiness clearance — the long, unglamorous process of proving that a weapon can be carried safely, released safely, and will separate cleanly from the airframe without coming back to hit it.

Get it wrong and the aircraft destroys itself. Which is why it takes years, and why nobody skips it.

What makes this instance unusual is who ran it. General Atomics says this was the first time it has led weapons qualification testing on behalf of a customer, rather than a government test organisation doing the work. For a company that has built its business on selling the same airframe family to a long list of nations, that is a capability worth having.

Two very British weapons

The pairing chosen says something about how the RAF expects to use the aircraft. Paveway IV is the service's standard precision bomb, a roughly 500 lb-class weapon with GPS and laser guidance that has been dropped from Typhoons and Tornados across two decades of operations. Brimstone 3 is the current generation of a missile designed for exactly the problem Reaper crews spent years wrestling with: hitting a moving vehicle without destroying the street it is driving down.

Neither is an American weapon, which is the point. Protector is an American airframe carrying a British weapons fit, certified to British airworthiness standards, and the six-year programme behind it existed largely to make that combination legal.

The bit that has not happened yet

Protector formally entered RAF service in June 2025 and has already deployed — imagery released by the Ministry of Defence this year shows aircraft operating from Cyprus, including at least one carrying a live Paveway IV well before this qualification was finished, which suggests an urgent operational clearance was granted along the way. The MoD has not commented on that.

But Initial Operating Capability still has not been declared. In a written parliamentary answer in January, defence minister Luke Pollard confirmed the type had yet to reach those milestones.

The Reaper it replaces flew for eighteen years and logged more than 173,000 hours before XIII Squadron put the last one away. Protector is bigger, flies further, and — uniquely for an aircraft of its size — is certified to share airspace with civil traffic rather than being confined to segregated corridors.

Now it can also carry the weapons it was bought to carry. What it does not yet have is a date for when that becomes an operational capability rather than a certified one.

Protector RG Mk 1 at RAF Waddington, its home station.

Sources: General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Aviation Week, UK Defence Journal, The Aviationist, Royal Air Force.