UK awards £1 billion New Medium Helicopter contract to Leonardo

The UK Ministry of Defence has awarded Leonardo a £1 billion contract for 23 AW149 helicopters, ending months of political uncertainty. The deal preserves Yeovil as Britain’s only military helicopter factory – but a fleet this small raises hard questions about whether the UK can truly close its rotary capability gap.

By The Other Chris, find him on X here: https://x.com/TotherChris, published on March 9, 2026.

The Contract

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) confirmed on March 2, 2026 that it has awarded Leonardo a £1 billion ($1.34 billion) contract for 23 AW149 medium-lift helicopters. The aircraft will be built at Leonardo’s Yeovil facility in Somerset under the New Medium Helicopter (NMH) programme, replacing the Royal Air Force’s retired fleet of Puma HC2s and consolidating roles previously performed by three separate aircraft types into a single platform.

The agreement sustains 3,300 jobs at Yeovil – the UK’s only end-to-end military helicopter manufacturing site – and a further 12,000 jobs across the wider UK supply chain of around 70 companies. The MoD also committed to additional investment in Proteus, Leonardo’s autonomous rotary-wing demonstrator, which completed its first flight in January 2026 and is being developed in partnership with the Royal Navy.

Defence Secretary John Healey described the deal as “a major vote of confidence in British industry, British workers and British innovation,” adding that Yeovil would become “the proud home of Leonardo’s global military helicopter production.” The MoD also indicated that around 20 countries have requirements for new medium-lift helicopters, with international orders potentially generating over £15 billion in UK exports over the next decade.

The announcement arrived just one day after Leonardo’s best-and-final offer deadline expired. The path to contract award was turbulent: The Telegraph reported that Chancellor Rachel Reeves had to intervene to override a Treasury position that the NMH programme had been “deprioritised” by the MoD – a dispute that had already seen an earlier planned announcement at Yeovil scrubbed. That intervention cleared the way for the formal award. No delivery timeline for the aircraft has yet been disclosed.

Recent History

The NMH programme dates to 2021, when the MoD announced it would replace its ageing Puma HC2 fleet alongside a number of smaller rotary assets, including Bell 212s, Bell 412s, and Airbus AS365 Dauphin helicopters. The original requirement envisaged up to 44 replacement aircraft; that figure was subsequently reduced, and the final order of 23 is a near one-for-one swap for the number of Pumas that had been in service.

Leonardo was not always the only option. Airbus Helicopters had been expected to offer a UK-built version of its H175M with Chinese components removed, and Lockheed Martin Sikorsky was at one stage preparing a variant of the UH-60 Black Hawk looking to leverage the MOU with the US Army’s Future Vertical Lift programme signed in 2022. Both withdrew in August 2024, citing their inability to meet the programme’s requirements. Leonardo was left as sole compliant bidder, yet even then the government took months to finalise the deal.

The Puma fleet itself was retired in March 2025, meaning the UK has been operating with a live capability gap in medium-lift rotary wing for the better part of a year. 

Tech profile: AW149

The AW149 is a twin-engine military helicopter, certified in 2014, and already in service with Poland, Egypt, and Thailand. It can carry up to 16 fully equipped troops over a range of 545 nautical miles and is designed for battlefield support, troop transport, special operations support, and humanitarian assistance. Its open systems architecture allows mission equipment to be integrated and upgraded without external approval – a key consideration for sovereign operational flexibility.

As part of the deal, Leonardo has committed to moving its AW149 export production line from Vergiate in Italy to Yeovil, expanding UK workshare to above 40 percent and positioning the site to service both British and international orders. The MoD has framed the Proteus investment as part of a broader ambition to make NMH “optionally crewed” in the future, a concept aligned with the government’s Defence Industrial Strategy.

The AW149 itself is a sound platform. Unlike its Puma predecessor, it is ship-capable from the ground up, which gives Joint Helicopter Command significantly more flexibility for amphibious and maritime support tasks. Its open architecture genuinely supports UK-sovereign integration of British-made mission equipment, reducing dependence on foreign proprietary systems for future upgrades. For a country that has historically struggled to upgrade rotary platforms without extensive and expensive manufacturer involvement, this is not a trivial benefit.

What about the AW149’s engines?

One detail conspicuously absent from every official document on both the government and manufacturer sides is the engine selection. Neither the MoD, DE&S, nor Leonardo’s own corporate communications named a powerplant directly – an omission that likely reflects diplomatic sensitivity, given Safran’s deep existing relationships with the UK and broader considerations around US industrial relations. Trade reporting attributes the CT7-2E1 choice directly to Leonardo. That decision would favour fleet commonality, range and efficiency over raw power: the CT7-2E1 belongs to the same GE engine family as the T700-GE-701D powering the UK’s Apache fleet, a considerably closer kinship than the Safran Aneto-1K has with the Merlin’s own RTM322 engines. The Aneto-1K is the more powerful engine, but the CT7-2E1 is the more fuel-efficient one – a consideration that compounds over a fleet lifetime and leans into the UK’s longer reach requirements.

Calibre Comment: Industrial politics won, but is it enough?

The most honest reading of the NMH award is that the government bought 23 helicopters primarily to preserve a factory. That is not necessarily wrong – the loss of Yeovil would have been a genuinely significant and likely irreversible blow to UK sovereign industrial capability in a domain that matters. The MoD also supports Merlin and Wildcat fleets from the same site, so the downstream risk was real. But the MoD’s own internal position – that the programme had been “deprioritised” – is telling. The political intervention by the Treasury, not operational urgency, is what closed the deal.

The capability logic is more complicated. The original NMH requirement called for up to 44 aircraft, replacing 35-39 legacy platforms across four types. The UK will now receive 23, a reduction of almost half. Even accounting for the retained AS365 Dauphins and a separate procurement of six H145Ms, the consolidated medium-lift fleet will be considerably smaller than the MoD had originally envisaged. A fleet of 23 aircraft, assigned across multiple roles – battlefield support, logistics, special operations, humanitarian assistance – will be stretched even as they enter service. Availability is rarely 100 percent in service, and without a meaningful plan for follow-on orders, the UK risks having bought itself out of the capability gap discussion rather than solving it.

The Proteus thread is arguably the most strategically interesting element of the deal. The autonomous rotary-wing programme has received relatively modest funding to date – the initial contract was worth £60 million over four years – but positioning Yeovil as a global centre of excellence for autonomous helicopter development is a credible industrial ambition if the investment actually follows. Optionally crewed lift has obvious applications across anti-submarine warfare, logistics, and ISR. Whether the MoD will have the budget headroom to operationalise Proteus before a competitor or competing technology such as the eVTOL does remains the open question. The Defence Investment Plan, still unpublished at the time of writing, will be the real test of whether these aspirations are funded commitments or political language.

Related reading from Calibre Defence:

• Project NYX: Thales down selected for UK Apache wingman
• Royal Navy Wildcat achieves IOC with Sea Venom
• DSEI UK 2025: Royal Navy clears Peregrine UAS for service

The export narrative will ultimately determine whether this contract represents good value for UK industry, and in return back to the MOD. Leonardo’s commitment to move its AW149 export production line to Yeovil is significant, and the addressable market of over 20 countries with medium-lift requirements is genuine. If international orders materialise at Yeovil, bearing in mind moving AW149 production has been offered and not followed through previously, then the economics of the programme improve substantially and the workforce expands. If they do not – if Leonardo prefers Italian or Polish production as previously, or if geopolitical pressures redirect procurement elsewhere – the UK will have spent £1 billion to sustain a production line that builds 23 helicopters for domestic use only. The government has made a bet. The odds are reasonable. But the payout depends entirely on what comes next

The lead image shows an AW149 in flight during RIAT in 2022. Credit: Airwolfhound from Hertfordshire, UK – AW-149, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121258346