Pushing the Envelope Again: Britain’s Sixth Generation Tempest Fighter Jet
British aviation has a history of pushing the envelope, as proven by legendary aircraft such as the Spitfire, the Concorde jetliner, and the Harrier VTOL jump jet.
Now Britain’s BAE Systems and its partners are hoping to make history again with the Tempest, the country’s proposed sixth generation jet fighter. If all goes to plan, the Tempest will enter service in 2035. It is being designed to match and/or exceed the capabilities of the US F-22 in terms of speed, range, ceiling, and stealth.
According to BAE Systems, the flying demonstrator now under development is the first UK crewed combat aircraft to be designed and built in 40 years. This piloted demonstrator will be a supersonic testbed for the Tempest’s many innovative technologies, put together by BAE Systems (lead integrator), Rolls-Royce (engines), and MBDA UK (missiles), with the UK Ministry of Defence.
As well, Tempest is the UK name for the aircraft being developed under the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), where this aircraft will serve as the core platform in a new, sixth generation system-of-systems. “We’re working with Italy (Leonardo S.p.A.) and Japan (Mitsubishi Heavy Industries) under the GCAP to design and develop this next generation aircraft,” said John Stocker, BAE Systems’ Business Development Director for Future Combat Air System. According to the Financial Times newspaper, “GCAP is one of the most ambitious military programmes ever attempted.”
The UK industrial contribution to develop Tempest is being managed under the ‘Team Tempest’ banner, bringing together the UK’s sovereign combat air partners. This involves Leonardo UK handling the sensors/communications systems and integration. “What we are working on, with our partners in Italy and Japan, is a set of products under the umbrella of an integrated sensing and non-kinetic effecting system (ISANKE) and an integrated communication system (ICS) designed to deliver sixth generation capability and operational advantage to the user,” said Jonathan Smith, Leonardo UK’s VP Capability and CTO, Future Combat Air (GCAP). “We will then link all those things together.”
Collectively, Team Tempest is working with the UK Ministry of Defence with the goal of delivering the Tempest in half the time and at significantly lower cost than previous combat air programs like the one that created the Typhoon jet fighter.
Why the Tempest?
The roots of the Tempest project can be traced back to 2018, when the UK government unveiled its ‘Combat Air Strategy’. According to the Strategy’s Executive Summary, “The Combat Air sector delivers UK jobs, UK design, UK innovation and UK sovereign capability by taking an innovative and international approach. This Strategy lays out a vision for how the UK will remain at the forefront in this critical sector as we leave the EU; ensuring we can continue to make a pivotal contribution to European and global security.”
BAE Systems, Leonardo UK, Rolls Royce and MBDA collectively formed ‘Team Tempest’ to meet the challenges identified in the Combat Air Strategy’s “longer term capability requirement, that is driven primarily by what we describe as the ‘2040-plus threat environments,” said Stocker. “It fundamentally comes down to a principle of needing to retain ‘control of the air’, as we refer to it, because of the importance of control of the air to multi-domain operations and the UK’s ability to deliver military effects in a whole range of different scenarios.”
In designing the Tempest to meet these needs, BAE Systems is aiming to provide Britain with freedom of action, freedom of modification, and freedom of export for its domestically-built sixth generation fighter. These freedoms are not guaranteed when the country uses aircraft built elsewhere like the F-35. And although Lockheed Martin has been careful to spread contracts and jobs for this aircraft across its non-U.S. partners, there is no doubt that building its own fighter gives Britain an edge in earning profits and creating jobs at home.
Details to Date
For security reasons, BAE Systems is not releasing many details about the Tempest’s design and capabilities. Nevertheless, some details have been released, while others can be deduced. As well, the RAF’s website at raf.mod.uk has a section dedicated to Team Tempest (www.raf.mod.uk/what-we-do/team-tempest/the-tech/), which we will cite in this article and credit to the RAF.
Like the F-35 and F-22, the supersonic Tempest is designed to be a stealthy aircraft. Based on what information has been released, it is intended to fulfill missions such as air superiority, ground attack, and intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance (ISR). This is why the Tempest will be built using a modular airframe, one that supports fast upgrades and new technologies as they emerge in the future.
“A key attribute of this future combat air capability is designing it so that it can evolve through its lifespan,” said Duncan McCrory, Leonardo UK’s Chief Engineer of Future Combat Air. “Having an architecture which is designed so that there are software-defined capabilities that enable us to ensure that it will remain relevant, and it can be updated rapidly in response to new and unforeseen threats.”
To make this possible, “Tempest will bring a ‘plug and play’ approach, where software and hardware can be easily changed in and out depending on the capability and functions needed for a mission,” said the RAF website (RAF). “That could be different kinds of weapons, sensors, or fuel tanks. This innovation removes the usual rigid structures of assembly and will make manufacturing more cost effective and flexible than before.”
To maintain a stealthy profile, the Tempest will have an internal weapons bay. Its weapons suite could include directed energy (laser) and AI-guided weapons, plus hypersonic missiles. As well, “Operators will be able to carry different payloads, such as fuel tanks and camera pods, to adapt Tempest to a wide range of combat and surveillance roles,” the RAF said.
Speaking of weapons, “Tempest needs to support existing weapons, planned weapons, and the weapons of the future,” said the RAF. “For instance, the next generation Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air Missile Meteor and the network enabled precision surface attack missiles of the SPEAR family of weapons, will be optimised for Tempest. Effectors will be used to protect Tempest by helping to assess and evaluate incoming threats, and then in managing the deployment of the appropriate method to defeat it. We’re also working to make effectors part of Tempest’s sensor network, to further enhance the information available to pilots and operators.”
The Tempest will also be designed to support electronic warfare (EW) and to resist EW attacks against itself, as well as being cyber-secure. “I think there’s recognition that in both the current and the future operational environment, EW and Cyber are definitely threats that we need to be cognizant of, and they cannot be addressed in isolation,” McCrory said. “This is why, within Leonardo UK, there is a significant EW and Cyber resilience effort. We have experts in the EW and Cyber domain who are working to ensure that the architectures that we’re developing, the standards we’re employing and the principles that we are bringing into the system design, will deliver a robust system that can be quickly adapted as the EW and Cyber threats evolve through the life of the program. And we’re not doing that in isolation, we’re working closely with our Team Tempest partners because the entire aircraft needs to be resilient to these threats.”
Engine performance is central to any aircraft’s success in combat (or failure). Although Team Tempest has not released details of this aircraft’s jet engines, the RAF website said that “Tempest needs a range of high-density power and propulsion systems to be world beating. To achieve this, we are developing advanced composite materials and additive manufacturing to produce lightweight, power dense configurations capable of operating at higher temperatures.”
“We’re also developing world-leading electrical generation technology and intelligent integrated power management to power Tempest’s advanced sensors and effects, particularly those which are laser-based,” the RAF continued. “This integrated power approach reduces the number of energy exchanges, maximising the potential of the gas-turbine as the primary power source.”
The Tempest’s control systems will use AI to reduce the workload on the pilot, managing the Tempest’s operations based on real-time sensor data so that its human operator can focus on decision-making and situational awareness. “The human brain is a hugely impressive thing, but it can only deal so much, especially in potentially stressful situations,” Stocker observed. “AI will be part of a suite of technologies that will support the operator in effectively discharging their core responsibility as battlespace manager, to make the right decisions at the right time.” This includes harnessing data from the fused situational awareness picture provided by the ISANKE system.
In a major shift, the functions normally shown on cockpit displays will instead be projected onto the pilot’s helmet-mounted display, using augmented reality (AR) to show them without interfering with their view of the outside world. This AR-enabled control system will result in a physically blank cockpit, except for a joystick controller on the right side.
“We’re working towards our concept of cockpits without a single physical dial or screen,” said the RAF. “Other pilot support concepts such as virtual assistants are also being developed and tested.”
The AR system will be pilot-configurable, allowing them to ‘see through the floor’ if they so choose to improve situational awareness.
The use of AI to analyse and assess the situational awareness picture from ISANKE, as well as to fly the aircraft and make real-time tactical decisions, will give Tempest pilots a profound advantage in the aerial battlespace. Thanks to these aids, “The Tempest operator will be able to think and act two to three steps ahead of their adversary because of the advanced and highly integrated sensors, non-kinetic effects, and communications systems,” the RAF said. “All of these systems will be highly integrated, and designed to work seamlessly together, unlike current fighter jets that tend to be separate pieces of equipment, such as separate radar and electro-optics. Operators will be able to make decisions with more confidence because they are not relying on single sensors. Instead, multiple types of sensors will work in concert to gather information, which is automatically cross-checked and cross-referenced by the Tempest system. [As well] The Tempest will constantly mine and coordinate data from multiple sources, such as other aircraft, to provide extremely reliable and usable information that can in turn be shared with other aircraft in a ‘combat cloud’.”
“Essentially we’re trying to provide an operational advantage to the user to enable them to make decisions faster, to make more effective decisions and to give them the confidence in the decisions that they’re making based upon the depth and the breadth of information that is being received and is being processed,” said Smith. “Looking at that operational advantage, we’re trying to make a pilot’s job easier, to make sure that we can load more mission tasking onto that pilot. We’re looking at enabling a pilot to perform multiple roles simultaneously that would normally have to be taken care of by multiple platforms.”
As for integration of the Tempest into the RAF’s mission management system? “We’re contributing to the PYRAMID Open Mission System and exploiting technologies developed in the Ground Based Air Defence command and control domain,” the RAF website said. “This will enhance the operational effectiveness of Tempest in Air-to-Air engagements.” (According to the British government’s GOV.UK website, “The UK MOD [Ministry of Defence] has developed a reusable and open avionics system reference architecture, applicable for both legacy and future air platforms. Known as PYRAMID, this approach will make upgrades more rapid and reduce software maintenance costs.”)
The Big Picture
Taken as a whole, the sixth generation Tempest represents a quantum leap in the design and deployment of fighter aircraft. At the same time, the label ‘sixth generation’ does attach a great deal of expectations and assumptions to the aircraft as a physical entity. This is why BAE Systems prefers the name ‘next generation’ rather than ‘sixth generation’.
“We tend to talk about ‘next generation’ rather than assign numbers to things because the Tempest’s capabilities will be constantly evolving,” said Stocker. “We see this aircraft as having
a service life of many, many decades and one that will be continually changing in terms of additive capability that will be through software rather than physical hardware changes.”
This notion of additive capability explains why the Tempest is being designed to be flexible and modular. With so much of modern warfare moving into the EW and cyber domain, the fighter aircraft of tomorrow must be able to adapt to seismic shifts in digitally-enabled strategies and technologies – many of which have likely not been imagined yet.
A case in point: The growing versatility and usefulness of drones – as shown in the Ukrainian war -is a trend that the Tempest’s designers are taking into consideration. “While the core crewed core platform of the Tempest is very important, how the aircraft works with uncrewed types of aircraft or potentially other types of assets in the air, land, or space domains also matter,” Stocker said.
In being able to work well with other systems, the Tempest will be well-suited for ‘multi-domain integrated operations’, which is a NATO strategy for coordinating military activities across all operating domains and environments. “For the US, the UK and advanced allied military capable nations, that journey towards multi-domain integrated operations is a key objective to be able to deliver more effective capability across the whole force,” said Stocker. “This next generation combat air capability, as provided by the Tempest, will be a critical node in all of that.”
Make no mistake: Keeping pilots alive is vital to modern military success. It takes years to train new pilots, and many missions for these pilots to become battle-hardened and operationally wise. So anything that enhances their survivability is a positive step forward, particularly at a time when the world’s militaries are having a tough time recruiting and retaining talent.
In the meantime, Team Tempest has more immediate concerns to manage, with delivering a demonstrator aircraft being just one of many.
“We are working to a 2035 in-service date for Tempest,” Stocker said. [To achieve this] “We tend to bracket the opportunity and the challenge areas into three main groupings. One is around what we call Enterprise Agility, which really means how do we put the right kind of organisations in place and give them the right authorities, the right funding, and the right capability to be able to deliver the program in a really efficient way.”
In parallel to this, Leonardo UK is working closely with 2Excel Aviation Ltd and the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) to deliver the ‘Excalibur’ Flight Test Aircraft (FTA). The Excalibur FTA is a derivative of a Boeing 757 aircraft, and it will be used as a ‘flying laboratory’ to de-risk and demonstrate the critical sensing and communications technologies for ISANKE and ICS.
The second grouping is “Manufacturing Technology”; what it will take to build the next generation Tempest in an efficient and affordable manner. To figure this out, “we’re investing heavily in a whole range of different technologies such as model-based systems engineering, next generation manufacturing, and massive 3D printing, for want of a better term,” Stocker noted. “And then the third area is Product Complexity: How do we understand which technologies are going to be most suitable to develop different types of capabilities and also how can we pull it in from other sectors?”
The bottom line: Designing, developing and building the sixth generation Tempest is likely the greatest challenge ever tackled by the British aerospace industry (in concert with its partners in Italy and Japan). This being said, UK aircraft designers do have a strong history of surmounting similar challenges in the past, as proven by the Spitfire, Concorde, and Harrier.
