The UK is looking beyond Europe and its traditional partners as it pushes toward a critical milestone for the Tempest Future Combat Air System.
With deadlines looming to submit a business case for the initiative at the end of the year, the UK Defense Ministry and the Team Tempest industry consortium of BAE Systems, Leonardo, MBDA and Rolls-Royce—which are supporting the UK Future Combat Air System Technology Initiative (FCAS TI)—are working to mature technologies and develop a business model that will pave the way for how partner nations and industry will interact and combine their development efforts.
- Tempest acquisition plan will enter assessment phase in 2021
- Technology is widening options for international partners
The aim is to develop a next-generation, low-cost combat aircraft that could be combined with additive capabilities such as unmanned loyal wingmen to replace fourth-generation platforms like the UK Royal Air Force’s Eurofighter Typhoons or the Swedish Air Force’s early-model Saab Gripens in the mid-2030s, and to do it in at least half the time it took to bring the Eurofighter to front-line service.
The UK has global ambitions for the aircraft and is hoping it can build on its international relationships post-Brexit to find future partners and customers for the platform.
“What we are doing is talking to governments about what we’re doing. We are thinking about what their needs might be, and we are making sure that we can keep the door open for as long as possible in as many different ways as possible so they can partner with us in a meaningful way,” Richard Berthon, the UK Defense Ministry’s Combat Air Acquisition program director tells Aviation Week.
There are challenges ahead, however. The aftermath of the novel coronavirus pandemic is likely to cast a long shadow over public spending, while a review of UK foreign and defense policy may send ripples through plans for future defense capabilities. Yet defense and industry officials are confident that plans for Tempest can prevail through these challenging times.
“I’m confident that there’s a really strong understanding of the benefits of investing in Combat Air,” Berthon explained. “The message is well understood in terms of the benefits from international partnering for the industrial base, to investing more in research and development . . . as well as military capability elements.”
He notes that the industry efforts have already led to the creation of some 1,800 jobs even before the program has entered its next phase, with more to follow as the program advances.
“If we are coming out of Brexit and COVID-19 and want to stand on a world stage, defense has to matter, and air power has to matter,” says Chris Boardman, managing director for BAE Systems’ Air business.
“I am not complacent,” he says. “I do recognize that the coronavirus pandemic has brought big social and economic problems, but I am confident that the requirement is not going to go away.”
For the last five years, the UK has been reskilling capabilities and developing technologies through its FCAS TI program that could be fed into a future combat aircraft. These efforts were finally made public with the unveiling of the Combat Air Strategy and Team Tempest at the 2018 Farnborough Airshow. Since then, the British government has signed a 10-year memorandum of understanding with Sweden and agreed on a statement of intent with Italy, last July and September, respectively.
Studies currently underway with both nations will help identify the requirements of each nation and ensure that the needs of Italy and Sweden are understood as the Tempest program proceeds to the next step.
In late July, the Swedish defense ministry will submit budgetary documentation to allow it to begin development work on next-generation combat aircraft between 2021 and 2025, including studies, technology development and demonstrator activities with international partners.
“Discussions are more at the government, air force and [defense ministry] level at the moment,” explains Norman Bone, chairman and managing director of Leonardo UK and the head of Leonardo’s defense electronics business. “Industry [from all three countries] have been talking, but we have not all been in the room with the three parties . . . though we are not far away from that,” he says.
“In Italy and Sweden, we feel we have got something in common . . . an aligned view of what is required, and we think our industrial bases are complimentary,” Berthon says.
How the nations and industry will work together is still to be formalized, but Berthon is looking for an “agile and organic” approach that is “fast enough to keep pace with the program.”
“What we shouldn’t do is replicate the way we set up [Eurofighter] Typhoon,” Bone explains, noting that the Eurofighter program’s workshare approach—with each partner-nation building elements of every aircraft and assembling them in four different countries—does not lend itself to the low-cost, export ambitions of Tempest.
“Having an export-centric platform that can be spiraled to national requirement is going to be at the core of what we are trying to do here,” Bone adds. “That is the reason we are designing this from the inside out.”
The model will need to be able to adapt to new partners. UK is eying additional nations to join the program, in particular Japan, which is looking for a collaborative partner for a fighter that will replace the Mitsubishi F-2.
“You need to have partners who are willing to go on the same journey with you in a pretty comprehensive sense,” Berthon explains. “There is also an opportunity for others to partner in a way that suits them.”
Tempest partners will need to believe in doing things in a “different and more efficient way,” suggests Boardman, with “less guaranteed workshare, independent of capability, more best athletes, more new capability and more proven TRL [Technology Readiness Level] to be able to do that activity.”
Technology is one of the key enablers that will allow the Tempest to keep the “door open to new partners for longer,” Berthon suggests.
Although the milestone business case will likely narrow down the architecture of the aircraft, digital technologies mean that some key decisions can be held off until technologies can be matured.
“We can retain more choice for longer, and that’s really helpful,” Berthon explains. “The people working on Eurofighter had to set a concept decades before the capability would enter into service.”
One of those systems will be the Tempest’s open mission system, the BAE Systems-led Pyramid, which, according to Berthon, will allow for different configurations within the combat air system. “I think that creates the opportunity for a lot more agile partnering,” he says.
Baseline architecture for Pyramid was recently completed and shared with the Tempest partners, officials tell Aviation Week. And even though its development sits outside the Tempest development, “it is a fundamental building block,” Boardman says, noting that BAE has been working on the building blocks for the Tempest for the past 15-20 years, mainly through its unmanned programs such as the Mantis, Taranis and Magma.
Today, the company is further maturing technologies around next-generation cockpits and payload bays, but a key focus is how the Tempest could be produced.
“The factory of the future is about low volume and low cost . . . how you break the norm of the past, which says you have to have high volume to get low cost,” Boardman explains.
An area of interest for BAE is a process called cobotics whereby workers cooperate with robotics to complete certain tasks. Specially developed workbenches can be adapted for tasks and assist the workers through a particular process using technologies such as augmented reality.
Boardman says BAE is already trying out new manufacturing techniques for wiring and looming on the Typhoon and testing the cobotic benches at several manufacturing and assembly points.
At Leonardo, the company’s efforts are focused on a future multifunction array radar, defensive aids and sensor fusion. Late last year, the company revealed it had developed radar-warning receiver technologies that are four times more accurate than existing sensors, are 1/10th the size, and have considerably reduced power requirements. While the company’s work on the Captor-E active, electronically scanned array radar for the Eurofighter uses the gallium arsenide semiconductor, the company is experimenting with other materials, including gallium nitride and silicon germanium for future sensors on the Tempest.
Bone says developing the sensors will be a close collaborative effort with Saab and Leonardo teams in both the UK and Italy.
“One will probably take the lead, but the other two will be very important in the design of it, and that will be the same for most of the key sensor activity,” he says.
The next step for the Tempest is an assessment phase in which the technology developed by the FCAS TI will be matured and tested. Then it will be demonstrated that it can function as part of a system, potentially in flight on Team Tempest’s planned Boeing 757 testbed announced last July. That aircraft, to be supplied through a contract with Leonardo by 2Excel Aviation has already been sourced and is currently in storage, ready for conversion work and flight tests during the early 2020s.
UK officials dismiss the need to merge the Tempest initiative with those of France, Germany and Spain’s own FCAS. In June, Airbus Defense and Space CEO Dirk Hoke told the London-based Royal Aeronautical Society that maintaining two programs in Europe could be a “bad solution” for both the UK and the European Union, repeating the 1990s error of Europe having three combat aircraft developments in parallel: Eurofighter, Gripen and Rafale.
“I don’t see this sort of inherent logic that everything must merge together,” Berthon said. “There are many factors around the industrial and technology base and the partnering histories that each of us has globally. . . . The UK has a different military strategy from anywhere else, as does France, as does Germany, and that has driven us to where we want to be.”
He notes the requirements of the FCAS are radically different from that of the Tempest. Derivatives of the French, German and Spanish aircraft will need to operate from an aircraft carrier and perform the nuclear deterrence mission, both of which could bring additional complexity and cost to the program.
Having two programs in Europe maintains “a degree of competitive pressure on our industries,” Berthon suggests. Such competition, he says, has been helpful by not leading Europe into a monopoly on supply.
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