Eurosatory 2026: The H160M’s agnostic approach to drones draws global interest

Vincent Chenot, head of the H160M programme, was continually interrupted by curious bystanders as he spoke to Shephard while standing in front of a H160M Guépard mock-up in the helicopter area at Eurosatory 2026.

“You just have to stand up there and look at all the people interested in the aircraft,” he told Shephard at the show. “I’m not talking about people just having a look, but people really interested. You have all the regions – America, north and south, Africa, Southeast Asia, and obviously several countries in Europe.”

That reported breadth of interest reflects something wider than one programme’s export ambitions. The H160M – France’s Joint Light Helicopter (JLH) programme selection, contracted to replace five types of rotorcraft across the French Army, Navy and Air & Space Force.

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On track, but the hard part is still ahead

The programme’s development status is, by most measures, encouraging. The first prototype completed its maiden flight in July 2025 and had accumulated 75 flight hours at the time of the Eurosatory interview, according to the head of programme, who described the aerodynamics and general aircraft behaviour as validated without surprises.

A second prototype had entered the flight line and was approaching its own first flight. A firing campaign was scheduled for the coming weeks. Bench testing of the full weapons chain, from the electro-optical system (EOS) targeting unit and laser designator through to the effectors, had already been completed.

According to Airbus Helicopters, army deliveries remain on schedule for late 2028. The French Navy’s variant is scheduled to follow approximately two years later, with the Air & Space Force projected by the company to complete the transition in 2032. The French Ministry of Armed Forces has ordered 169 H160Ms in total, according to Shephard’s Defence Insight.

The programme head was direct that the phase now underway, the upward leg of what he called the development V-cycle, is where complexity concentrates.

Among the live workstreams: integration and testing of the avionics suite, including a brand-new flight management system from Thales called FlytX.

The production rhythm for French Ministry of Armed Forces deliveries is planned at 20 aircraft per year, with additional capacity reserved for exports.

The H160M carries no third-seat mission console. The aircraft’s integrated mission system is, in the programme head’s formulation, “the third crew.”

“Each time we show the cockpit, it’s not only nice, it’s really a new way to work,” he said. “The man-machine interface is really different from what was existing before, and this is really new. It’s an area where most delegations are positively surprised.”

The drone question

The most significant element of the H160M’s design may be the one that generates the least visible hardware: its native capacity for crewed-uncrewed teaming (CUC-T).

“From day one, we start with the capacity,” Chenot said. “We are natively able to work with drones with this aircraft.”

More significant still is the deliberate posture of agnosticism on which drone partners the H160M will work with.

“We want to be agnostic,” the programme head said. “We’re talking about the different missions. The first missions will be ISR, but we can really team with different drones. Everything is visible, the area is just very wide, and we just want to be agnostic and be able to do everything. Then afterwards we adapt to the operational concepts our potential customers may want to have.”

A second Airbus Helicopters spokesperson elaborated: “Crewed-uncrewed teaming is really one of the priorities of the company right now. We’re doing a lot of different experiments with different platforms, either H145M, NH90, H225M and with different UAS. We’ve worked with the VSR700, with the Flexrotor, with drones from our customers which were not Airbus drones. The area of missions is just huge – it’s logistics, it’s targeting, it can be everything.”

Airbus Helicopters envisions scaling from single-drone teaming to multi-drone and eventually swarm management.

Prospective buyers are actively asking about drone compatibility, they noted. Chernot described this as generating “questions about teaming, potential evolutions, which drones are compatible”.

The programme head’s framing of success was deliberately open-ended.

“We want to capture the maximum market with this aircraft,” he said. “Each and every opportunity we can capture with this aircraft, we would want to fight for it.”

Airbus Helicopters’ answer, with the Guépard, is to start from the architecture rather than retrofit interoperability with drones. Whether the market agrees is, for now, what the delegations crowding the mock-up are quietly deciding.

Related Programmes in Defence Insight

Joint Light Helicopter (HIL) Programme

Related Equipment in Defence Insight

VSR-700

NH90

H225M