HMS Dragon (D35): Eighteen Tonnes of Drugs Seized, Then a Cameo in a James Bond Film

Built on the Clyde

HMS Dragon was built by BAE Systems Naval Ships at Scotstoun on the River Clyde, ordered in December 2000, laid down on 19 December 2005, launched on 17 November 2008 and sponsored by Mrs Susie Boissier, and commissioned on 20 April 2012, a Type 45 destroyer displacing between 8,000 and 8,500 tons, capable of over 30 knots and carrying a crew of 191 with accommodation for up to 235.

Shadowing the Russians

HMS Dragon sailed with the American carrier group led by USS Nimitz in the Arabian Sea in 2013, and exercised with RAF Typhoon fighters in the Persian Gulf that same year. In 2014, she deployed north of Scotland specifically to track the Russian warship Vice-Admiral Kulakov, and took part in Atlantic Patrol Tasking duties, visiting South Georgia and the Falkland Islands before transiting the Panama Canal. She returned to Russian-tracking duty in 2016, shadowing two Russian corvettes through the Atlantic Ocean and the Bay of Biscay, exactly the kind of routine but genuinely important surveillance work that has occupied Royal Navy destroyers with growing frequency as Russian naval activity near British waters increased through this period.

A Rescue at Sea

In 2017, HMS Dragon rescued the fourteen-person crew of the dismasted yacht Clyde Challenger, some 610 nautical miles southwest of Land's End, a genuinely dramatic mid-Atlantic rescue that put her considerable capabilities to humanitarian use far from any military mission.

A Record Haul of Narcotics

HMS Dragon's Middle East deployment between 2018 and 2019 produced a genuinely remarkable run of counter-narcotics successes: eight separate drug busts yielding over 18 tonnes of narcotics in total, including 3,048 kilograms of hashish and 224 kilograms of heroin, among the largest cumulative drug seizure records achieved by any single Royal Navy vessel, a substantial disruption to the trafficking networks operating through the region's waters.

A Brush With Hollywood

HMS Dragon achieved an altogether different kind of fame in 2019, when she featured in the James Bond film No Time to Die, filmed off the Faroe Islands, a rare instance of a genuinely active front-line warship making a cameo appearance in a major motion picture rather than relying on a decommissioned vessel or studio mock-up. Her Welsh dragon emblems, removed during a 2011 refit, were restored in 2016 following a fundraising campaign, reconnecting the ship more visibly to the Welsh heritage her name and badge represent.

Ongoing Service

HMS Dragon departed in May 2025 for NATO's Formidable Shield exercise, and remains in active service with her home port at Portsmouth, a genuinely well-rounded career that has, in little more than a decade, encompassed everything from tracking Russian warships and record-breaking drug interdiction to a dramatic mid-Atlantic rescue and a supporting role in one of cinema's most enduring franchises.