The UK Defence Select Committee has published a report assessing the viability of the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), to deliver a sixth-generation fighter jet, on 14 January 2025.
In the making since 2019, the trilateral industrial endeavour between Italy, Japan, and the UK is moving closer to reality with the establishment of the industrial and governmental organisations created to direct the project.
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However, as partners move closer to the manufacturing phase their political resolve will be put to the test.
“Whilst progress to date has been positive, previous multilateral defence programmes have frequently seen costs spiral and delays pile up,” the Committee report warns. “GCAP will have to break the mould if it is to achieve its ambitious target date.”
Due to enter service in 2035, the future fighter, known as ‘Tempest’ in Britain, will replace the outgoing Eurofighter Typhoon combat aircraft, which will retire in the early 2040s. The same goes for Italy while the jet will replace the Mitsubishi F-2 for the Japanese.
More pressure is placed on GCAP lately as the UK remains the only lead nation of the Eurofighter programme, now more than 20 years old, not to have placed an order for additional aircraft in 2024.
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By GlobalDataTimeline: ambitious or improbable?
Following the creation of a political organisation in December 2023 and a joint venture last month, the partners now have ten years to deliver a full operational capability.
Whereas, it took around eight years for the Eurofighter partners just to start the manufacturing stage. GCAP partners, meanwhile, still need to develop a demonstrator and prototypes before building begins.
This is disconcerting given that the UK government has already confirmed that a flying demonstrator is scheduled to be ready by 2027. Although this is not a prototype, the Committee learned that the demonstrator should be “a reasonably good representation” of the GCAP platform.
Authority over the programme
“Given the ambitious timescales for GCAP,” the report emphasised that the “delivery structures at the governmental and industrial levels will need to be sufficiently empowered to take timely and binding decisions as the programme progresses.”
Put simply, authority over development should not be contested to avoid individual changes and delays.
The Committee optimistically noted that both Italy and the UK – two lead nations in Eurofighter – have learned from this problem of the structural failings within the European programme.
“This early commitment to empowering GCAP’s delivery organisations must be sustained throughout the programme’s development if it is to succeed.”
Future-proof
The programme must also be “future-proof”, the report asserted. The concept must be flexible in accomodating technological advancements in the coming years to keep pace with new methods of combat air methods and technologies, such as crewed-uncrewed teaming.
The crewed jet will need to operate alongside autonomous collaborative platforms, or ‘ACPs’, the report acknowledged. A consensus has formed that suggests this hybrid fighting concept, driven by artificial intelligence, is a major component for what we have come to envisage in ‘sixth-generation’ aircraft.
As 2024 drew to a close, videos from China’s Chengdu Aircraft Corporation unveiled the maiden flight of a large, delta-wing style aircraft that has come to be known, in the West at least, as the ‘Chengdu J-36’.
The Chinese government claimed the J-36 is the world’s first sixth-generation aircraft, though the state did not offer any clarification on its capabilities according to a GlobalData analyst briefing at the time.
