TOKYO, June 25 (Reuters) – Canadian Defence Minister David McGuinty said on Thursday he had discussed the advanced fighter jet \u200cprogramme being pursued by Japan, Britain and Italy with \u200chis Japanese counterpart to learn more about what he described as a “promising initiative”.<\/p>\n
The \u200bthree countries launched the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) in 2022 to field a next-generation stealth fighter by 2035, led by Britain’s BAE Systems, Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Italy’s Leonardo.<\/p>\n
Canada’s potential interest comes as \u200cthe programme attracts attention \u2060from potential new partners and a rival European fighter project has collapsed. Any Canadian involvement would mark \u2060GCAP’s first expansion beyond its three founding members. Speculation has grown that additional countries could join the programme, with Italian Defence Minister \u200bGuido Crosetto \u200bsaying this month he would \u200bwelcome partners willing to share \u200cdevelopment costs.<\/p>\n
“We are interested in learning more about it. I’ll take it back to my team and see what it looks like,” McGuinty told Reuters in an interview after meeting Japanese Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi in Tokyo on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Officials in Rome and executives \u200cat Leonardo have floated Canada, Saudi \u200bArabia and Germany as potential future partners \u200bor observers. Any expansion \u200bof GCAP would require the agreement of its \u200cthree founding members.<\/p>\n
GCAP is one of \u200btwo major Western \u200bsixth-generation fighter projects, alongside the U.S. Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) programme.<\/p>\n
A rival European effort, the Future Combat Air \u200bSystem (FCAS), that was \u200cbeing developed by France, Germany and Spain, has collapsed \u200bamid a dispute between Airbus and Dassault Aviation.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bTim Kelly; Editing by David Dolan)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TOKYO, June 25 (Reuters) – Canadian Defence Minister David McGuinty said on Thursday he had discussed the advanced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102854,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,16325,12351,37140,384,37141,37143,37142],"class_list":["post-102853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-canada","tag-david-mcguinty","tag-fighter-jet","tag-global-combat-air-programme","tag-japan","tag-japanese-counterpart","tag-mitsubishi-heavy-industries","tag-stealth-fighter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}