“Sweden is an ideal partner; few nations work as well together as Sweden and the UK,” said British Defense Procurement Minister Stuart Andrew, formally announcing the signing of the MOU on July 19, the first day of the Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) here.
“It is of mutual interest to partner with an actor who is operationally and industrially skilled,” Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist said, adding that both nations had “recognized each other’s strengths and the need for an equal partnership.”
The UK and Sweden will remain open “for others to join the discussions,” he noted.
The 10-year agreement does not “entail long-term commitments between the countries, but is intended to enable future positions,” the Swedish defense ministry stated.
Micael Johansson, Saab’s deputy CEO, says he expected the partnership to lean on Saab’s experience with “cost initiatives, model-based engineering and digitalization—things we have worked hard on the
,”
“International cooperation is part of Saab’s strategy for growth, and the collaboration with the British industries represents that way of working also with regard to the future,” Saab President Hakan Buskhe said at RIAT.
Technology developed for the future fighter would also be incorporated into both the Typhoon and the Gripen, increasing their capabilities until the new platform arrives.
To prepare for work with the UK, Saab completed a rights issue at the end of 2018 to generate capital for research and development. The British government has budgeted £1.9 billion ($2.4 billion) for the various FCAS TI technology programs. Tempest-related work is now employing around 1,000 people, with another 800 expected to join the work by year-end.
Officials say that despite the different defense doctrines of Sweden and the UK—Sweden has focused on self-defense, while the UK traditionally has been more expeditionary—the requirements are aligning because of the future threat picture.
“We tend to have different needs, and certainly those were clear at the beginning, but we have quickly moved quite close together,” says
Group Capt. Jez Holmes, the Team Tempest program director.
“I think interaction with Sweden is very positive; we both have a very similar ethos so working together should be straightforward,” adds Holmes.
To progress the work on sensors, systems and avionics, Team Tempest and FCAS TI have contracted with British aerospace engineering company 2Excel Aviation to source and modify a
757 airliner to act as a flying testbed, in a similar vein to
’s 737 CATBird. The Tempest 757 should take to the air in the early 2020s.
One of its roles will be testing Pyramid, the Defense Ministry’s open-architecture software system, which it plans to roll out across the Tempest initiative as the backbone for sensors, mission systems and even engine control. The software will be distributed later this year for other platforms, including the Radar 2 active, electronically scanned radar for the
Typhoon.
“[The testbed] will allow people to see the whole integrated system with the digital backbone in operation significantly de-risking the program going forward,” explains Iain Bancroft, head of major air programs at Leonardo.
Another major factor helping to speed up the Tempest—at least compared to previous procurement programs—is Casnet, a secure classified network linking the major industrial partners in Team Tempest so that secret information can be shared and meetings can be conducted securely online. “The critical factor in this program is time,” says Holmes.
“We have demonstrated toolsets in our design, as well as the ability to iterate up to 20 times faster than we have in the past in various areas,” explains Holmes. “The advances in computational techniques and model-based engineering means that our ability to explore a range of concepts is vastly increased.”
There are nearly 80 classified projects associated with technologies that are directly associated with the Tempest, with some valued at hundreds of millions of pounds. Mordaunt said in her statement that the team is on track to deliver “17 European firsts and seven world-firsts,” noting Rolls-Royce’s work on embedding an electrical generator into the core of an Adour engine. Bancroft says Leonardo is working closely with Rolls-Royce to define the electrical and cooling requirements for a future powerplant and that directed-energy weaponry is still a key consideration in the program.
The British Defense Ministry recently confirmed it will provide further funding for the development of three additional directed-energy weapon demonstrators for lasers and radio-frequency-based systems.
At the Air Tattoo, BAE Systems revealed it has been researching wire-and-arc additive manufacturing of major structural components for a future platform. As an experiment, the company produced a structural member for the Eurofighter Typhoon. The long-lead item, which is normally forged then finished, must be ordered as far as 100 weeks in advance. However, the additive manufacturing process builds the component in just 100 days with considerably lower cost and material wastage.
The company also has been exploring weapon bay designs, showing off a rotary design for the unclassified Tempest concept model similar to one on the Blackburn Buccaneer subsonic maritime strike aircraft that entered service in the 1950s. The rotating design features three sections: one flush with the fuselage to preserve the aircraft’s low-observability characteristics and the other two able to each carry a pair of Meteor air-to-air missiles.
Two side bays flush with the air intakes would be able to launch short-range air-to-air missiles, as do the
Raptor and the Chinese J-20. Engineers are studying options for bay opening times and looking at the harmonic effects of airflows over shallow and deep weapon bays. The UK is one of the few European nations with experience in producing aircraft with internal weapon bays, but this experience does not extend to releasing weapons at supersonic speeds.
In the Royal Air Force’s Rapid Capability Office, the organization’s Air Information Experimentation (AIX) program is taking the first steps toward a combat cloud. A project called Deckard has produced, in just two months, a cloud-based program sharing information on the UK airspace picture to support air policing. Deckard has been introduced as part of a wider program called Nexus, which hopes to share this information across other platforms.
Britain is continuing its search for additional partners, nations “whose strategic objectives align with our own, including the determination to reduce costs,” Mourdant says.
“We recognize that in an effective and efficient collaboration, there will be an optimum number of partners, which may include those outside of Europe,” she adds.
Challenges remain, however. New Prime Minister, Boris Johnson is a Brexiteer looking to help Britain negotiate an exit from the European Union at the end of October, deal or no deal. A “hard” Brexit could do serious harm to the British economy. However, Sweden’s defense minister says he is not concerned: “Brexit or not, we have this cooperation, and we will make it deeper,” Hultqvist says.
