The United States and China are not the only ones who are designing great range into their upcoming combat aircraft. Britain, Italy and Japan have made the same decision.

The US is developing the Northrop Grumman B-21 bomber and the Boeing F-47 fighter to operate in the Western Pacific. China has the same geography in mind as it develops the Chengdu J-36. The Anglo-Italian-Japanese effort is the Global Combat Aircraft Program (GCAP).

Six years ago, Britain and Italy agreed to join forces on a future combat aircraft. Now, three years after Japan signed on and the program name became GCAP, the silence is deafening.

This is not natural in a multinational combat aircraft program. Someone, or everyone, should be accusing the others of exaggerating their intended orders with the aim of getting a bigger share of the work. There should be a fight over who, thanks to supposed long experience, has the right to lead the design of the radar. Or the left aileron. Or the cockpit lighting switch.

If there are such arguments, they are being settled behind closed doors, the same way that GCAP partner BAE Systems is building a technology-demonstrator aircraft for the program at Warton, England.

Visible progress is organisational. With the ratification of the founding GCAP treaty by the three partners, the GCAP International Government Organisation (GIGO) became active early this year as the joint customer, followed by the joint venture development and manufacturing company, named Edgewing. The latter combines BAE Systems of Britain, Leonardo of Italy and a Japanese consortium including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

Both GIGO and Edgewing will be located in Reading, England, with fast connections to Heathrow and central London. And nobody has argued about that either.

At this point one might ask, ‘Who are you and what have you done with the European defence bureaucracy?’ but it seems that the three nations have taken their time to construct the organisation while moving ahead on a design concept that is an acceptable solution in terms of risk, budget and capability.

‘It’s not understood how far we have come on the path to delivery,’ a British government GCAP leader said at the Defence IQ International Fighter Conference in Rome this month. (According to the conference rules, speakers may not be named.) ‘We are well into thousands of people, nearly into tens of thousands, and we are moving at a speed that people did not expect was possible. We’re doing the hard work of compromise.’

No further technical details of the aircraft have been made available, but the GCAP design is still depicted by the same artwork and models that were revealed last year—a very large delta-wing aircraft. ‘It’s different from NGAD (the Boeing F-47 Next Generation Air Dominance project) and it’s not an F-35. It’s complementary to current aircraft,’ the official says.

It is, he suggests, ‘a stealth F-111’. Known during its 37-year Royal Australian Air Force career as the Pig, and to the US Air Force as the Aardvark or just Vark, the swing-wing General Dynamics bomber tipped, or possibly crushed, the scales at 38 to 45 tonnes fully loaded, substantially more than the most heavily laden F-15E, including an impressive and useful 15 tonnes of internal fuel.



Internal fuel capacity tells us a lot about a combat’s aircraft to carry a war load over a distance or to stay on patrol station when others may have to return to base or look for a tanker. The RAAF’s Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornets, by comparison, carry about 6 tonnes of fuel.

GCAP, with its massive delta wing, could easily have just as much internal fuel as the Vark. It will be the heaviest combat aircraft ever built in Italy or Japan and the largest in Britain since the cancelled TSR.2 of the 1960s.

The reasons for the aircraft’s imposing size are the usual: weapon load and range. ‘Anti-access, area denial (A2AD) extends far out into our own territory,’ the official says, ‘and is accompanied by surface-to-surface fires. And if we allow A2AD to silence us, if we can’t communicate in the contested area, we will lose. Someone has to carve the pathway into the threat environment.’ The goal, he adds, is ‘1,000 miles of ingress’ (nautical miles, 1,850 km) into the A2AD zone.

Internal weapon load, elsewhere described as twice an F-35’s, or 4 tonnes at least, is driven by the need to make each costly sortie count, but also by weapon diversity and futureproofing. Asked if there is a family of weapons associated with GCAP, the official says that the goal is an aircraft that can be adapted to carry any weapon that is available, within limits, and that the team is thinking about weapons in size classes.

He also refers to GCAP as a ‘21st century Mosquito’, recalling a high-performance World War II aircraft that could carry a mix of air-to-air weapons and bombs or an all-bomb load comparable with the B-17 bomber’s. Those decisions are occupying the team’s attention now: ‘Every inch of weapon-bay space we have to pay for, but you only get to make that cut once.’

GCAP is clearly part of a system of systems, including uncrewed aircraft. But the idea is that each country can develop its overarching system and that the GCAP aircraft will have adaptable communications resources to fit each partner’s needs, rather than constraining customers to a set of complementary capabilities.

The GCAP engine is being developed by a team of Rolls-Royce, Japan’s IHI and Italy’s Avio. ‘The engine is leading this,’ the official says. ‘We’ve achieved a lot of milestone decisions on the way to a mature design.’ As noted in my article on GCAP in The Strategist last year, the engines will feature integrated starter-generators and deliver up to 2 megawatts of power. They are designed to provide proportionate cooling capacity, program managers presumably having learned from the F-35’s chronic and severe thermal management problems.

Other lessons have been learned in basing and logistics. ‘We need to build platforms [aircraft] that are ready to move on a sortie-by-sortie basis,’ says the GCAP leader. ‘Don’t assume you will land where you take off, and you’re not going to wait for a C-17’ airlifter to arrive. The contrast between that philosophy and the British F-35Bs that were temporarily stranded in Japan and India with technical problems during this year’s Operation Highmast is clear.

The door is open to other countries joining the GCAP program, with the provisos that they can get only what work is available, newcomers will not slow the program down, and the GCAP team does not want to be caught in a squabble like the one that France and Germany are having over their joint fighter project. For Australia, the GCAP is an obvious candidate as a Super Hornet replacement.

The program manager says that information on progress with the Tempest demonstrator may remain closely held for some time. But, thinking of the engineers, he adds, ‘I hope they fail a lot.’ It is a learning tool and environment for engineers who have no experience of building a new aircraft in this class. ‘If they don’t fail, they’re not learning.’ It’s refreshing to hear that kind of thinking.