UK Team Tempest

Saab Calling for Cooperative Role on Tempest

Jun 16, 2019 | ShowNews

is looking for a high-level of cooperation with British industry should Sweden decide to join the UK’s Tempest next-generation combat aircraft work, company CEO Hakan Bushke has suggested.

Pointing out the company’s successful role on the T-X jet trainer as a “co-designer and co-project leader,” with , Bushke hinted that Saab was looking for a similar level of cooperation, noting that the company would not merely work on the Tempest as “consultants selling man-hours.”

“We want to utilize the knowledge that we have . . . and be able to increase our knowledge going forward,” Bushke told industry journalists in Stockholm on May 20.

Sweden has shown significant interest in joining Tempest since it was launched at the 2018 Farnborough Airshow, with revealing later that year it was in a “deepening dialogue” with Saab. Since then, the Swedish defense company carried out a 6 billion Krona ($650 million) rights issue giving it additional capital to support its research and development programs that Bushke suggested to investors could be used to support work in conjunction with the UK.

Bushke would not say how Saab would get involved in the project. The UK Combat Air Strategy calls on the UK to take the lead in a multinational cooperation effort to develop and produce a combat aircraft and associated system ready for the 2030s and replacing types such as the .

Meanwhile the Swedish Defense Commission has called upon the government to make a decision about beginning to fund the development of a future fighter to replace the C/D aircraft toward the end of the 2030s, the commission’s white paper states. The commission says the funding should be provided during the early 2020s.

Bushke said discussions were ongoing, and that negotiations had been going well with “partners and government in the UK.”

He hinted that an agreement could be in the offing in several months, adding “hopefully we can take a rabbit out of the hat in some months to come.”

Swedish Cooperation Turns Tempest Into International Venture

Jul 26, 2019 | Aviation Week & Space Technology

Despite the hopes of industry in mainland Europe, the continent looks set to have two competing sixth-generation combat aircraft on the drawing boards during the 2020s and 2030s.

With the July 19 announcement of Sweden as the first of several “like-minded partners” for Britain’s Tempest, the UK system has become an international venture and a direct competitor to the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System (FCAS).

“We believe that Europe can afford two separate combat air programs,” former British Defense Secretary Penny Mordaunt said in a parliamentary statement on July 22, adding that the FCAS project simply “does not meet the objectives laid out in our [combat air] strategy.”

The memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the UK and Sweden paves the way for joint studies that will firm up mutual requirements and establish an outline plan for the industrial base for a potential future acquisition program. A report on the joint studies’ results is due next fall.

Swedish MOU explores joint requirements and industrial base

One or two concepts needed in 2020 for procurement process

UK is investing in -based flying testbed

Sweden’s biggest aerospace and defense company, , will be a key player after a year of “deepening dialog,” the term has used to describe the initial feasibility studies undertaken over the last year by the UK and Sweden.

However, Saab will not join Britain’s Team Tempest—a consortium of industrial and government entities—but will instead work directly with the different team members including BAE Systems, Leonardo, missile manufacturer MBDA and aero-engine company .

The timing of the report may be critical. The pace of the Tempest, its associated Future Combat Air System Technology Initiative (FCAS TI) and the UK’s own acquisition initiative to bring a replacement to the front line by 2035 demand at least one or two well-developed concepts that will be ready to enter the torturous government formal procurement process by the end of 2020.

Part 1

“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.”

Part 2

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.

Part 3

UK pursues low-cost unmanned combat aircraft

Richard Scott, London - Jane's International Defence Review

09 August 2019

Industry teams led by Blue Bear Systems Research, Boeing Defence UK, and Callen-Lenz have been awarded contracts by the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) to complete the preliminary design of a low-cost unmanned combat aircraft that can operate alongside manned fast jets as part of future air power mix.

The Lightweight Affordable Novel Combat Air (LANCA) technology demonstrator initiative, which is known as Project Mosquito, is intended to generate evidence in order to inform a potential future 'Loyal Wingman' requirement. As well as exploring the utility of an unmanned adjunct capability to inform the UK's Combat Air Strategy, the LANCA initiative is also intended to grow understanding of methods to radically reduce the cost and time of fielding a combat air capability of this class compared with traditional combat air systems.

LANCA emerged from the 2015 studies undertaken by the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) to understand how innovative combat air technologies and operating concepts might offer radical reductions in system cost and development time. Subsequently, LANCA was brought into the RAF RCO as part of the wider Future Combat Air System Technology Initiative (FCAS TI): apart from LANCA, the FCAS IT initiative also encompasses the Next Generation Combat Air System (being developed under the umbrella of Team Tempest).

The acquisition strategy for Project Mosquito is split into two phases: Phase I, which lasts for 12 months and covers preliminary system design, and Phase II, which will see a downselect to one or two teams to further mature their designs, complete manufacturing of the technology demonstrator, and complete a limited flight-test programme.

Up to two contracts will be awarded for Phase II. Initial flight tests of the demonstrator air vehicle could take place as early as 2022.

Brumby good luck to your thread;

somewhere in the first page I saw

"Some £2 billion ($2.6 billion) has been set aside from the 2015 Strategic Defense and Security Review for development of technologies associated with a future platform, ..."

so let me ask you (sorry if it's in some of the posts)

how much the UK already has spent on the Tempest?
(as of today), thanks

There are two different things running.

There is the developement of "future acquisition program", which is also to a large degree part a Tphyoon upgrade program. And Team Tempest which right now is an industry pitch. Remember that mock-up? It's paid by the industry partners.

I remember the other Euromockup Jun 24, 2019

Jura said:

Tuesday at 8:22 PM
now inside

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"Indeed, many

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, only launched a few months ago, is a Mission Impossible when one focuses on how much money — $4 billion by 2025 is to be jointly allocated by France and Germany."

so I guess I'm one of those "many", LOL in fact I think they kid themselves with farcical "6Gen" mock-up

now I see they could've paid for its wheels, LOL

Click to expand...

Jura said:

I remember the other Euromockup Jun 24, 2019

Click to expand...

That's not Tempest.

Pmichael said:

That's not Tempest.

Click to expand...

This is the one thing that we can all agree on. That mock up was paid for by Dassault.

Pmichael said:

There are two different things running.

There is the developement of "future acquisition program", which is also to a large degree part a Tphyoon upgrade program. And Team Tempest which right now is an industry pitch. Remember that mock-up? It's paid by the industry partners.

Click to expand...

So what?
Of course they will work on Typhoon upgrades that’s the norm only an idiot spends 100 million a pop on a fighter and then doesn’t keep it up to date. But if they went with the Franco German program then any British Aviation is done for. Same for Saab and Leonardo. Because the French German bird if going to be French above all else. Not like the Typhoon that is a work share.

Tempest an industry pitch that the Whitehall is backing. It was the British Defense secretary who announced the program not BAE’s CEO.
UK unveils new Tempest fighter jet model
Who was it that announced they were looking for a 757 to testbed tech for Tempest? A British government official again.
Incidentally Leonardo is reported to have set up a contract for that.
The UK and RAF are as much a partner as anyone.