An artist’s rendering of an MQ-9A Reaper equipped with the NATO Pod built by General Atomics and SENER Group. (Image provided by General Atomics)
EURONAVAL 2022 — General Atomics Aeronautical Systems plans by the end of this year to finish test flights for its NATO Pod, a new enclosure the company hopes will widen both the MQ-9A Reaper’s capabilities and foreign customer appeal.
The NATO Pod, being developed jointly by GA-ASI and the SENER Group, a private engineering and technology firm based in Spain, is a simple but ambitious idea. It’s an under-the-wing enclosure that allows a military’s domestic suppliers to plug and play customizable payloads onto the Reaper without the lengthy and tedious integration work traditionally required to onboard new capabilities.
Put another way, any MQ-9A Reaper can be equipped with payloads designed and developed by any country.
“We will conduct the NATO Pod’s final test flight later this year and it will then be available for operational evaluation experiment by our MQ-9A Block 5 customers,” Scott Smith, GA-ASI’s European regional vice president, told Breaking Defense.
The NATO Pod has no official buyers yet, according to Smith, but the companies in a 2020 joint statement announcing the start of development referenced the Spanish Armed Forces multiple times.
“[O]nce the first system of this type has come into operation in Spain, SENER reiterates its commitment to make available to the Spanish Ministry of Defense its capabilities and strengths in support of national industry through alliances, industrial cooperation and the development of an increasingly wide range of products,” Andrés Sendagorta, president of SENER, said at the time.
GA-ASI officials say that despite the lack of a contract from a military, the impetus for development came from recurring conversations with different European customers about how they could go about integrating specific payloads onto the MQ-9A.
The MQ-9A, a Group 5 unmanned aerial system focused on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, is a favored drone by the US Air Force and has been steadily gaining popularity among the Marine Corps.
When asked about discussions with the Pentagon, Smith said, “NATO Pod will be flown in the U.S. and it is in its initial development phase. Nothing prevents this pod [from being] offered to U.S. customers along with other GA-ASI pods that are available.”
