By Sarah Young <\/p>\n
FARNBOROUGH, England, July 22 (Reuters) – BAE Systems revealed a new unmanned fighter jet on Wednesday, boosting Britain’s entry into one of the defence industry’s hottest and most fiercely \u200ccontested markets. <\/p>\n
The UK’s biggest defence company showcased a model of its new jet, Brontanax, derived \u200cfrom the ancient Greek words for thunder and king, at the Farnborough Airshow. It is about the size of a Hawk trainer \u200band would be ready to start flight testing next year, BAE said. <\/p>\n
As the global threat level rises and western nations rearm, defence chiefs say the lesson from the Ukraine war is clear: nations need to control the skies to avoid Ukrainian-style attritional trench warfare and that requires air forces to bulk up. <\/p>\n
BAE enters an increasingly \u200ccrowded market for so-called Collaborative Combat \u2060Aircraft (CCA), with Airbus, Boeing, Anduril and General Atomics among a growing number of companies competing for business at Farnborough in a sector expected to expand rapidly. <\/p>\n
Often described as “loyal \u2060wingmen,” CCAs are designed to fly alongside piloted aircraft and are expected to cost roughly a third as much as a traditional fighter jet. <\/p>\n
CROWDED MARKETPLACE <\/p>\n
BAE said it has invested heavily in its CCA, pushing ahead without the government \u200bco-investment \u200bwhich usually underpins new platforms. <\/p>\n
“We’ve put our money where \u200bour mouth is,” CEO Charles Woodburn told Reuters. <\/p>\n
“We \u200ccould see where the market was going,” he added, saying he hopes to secure a UK order, and that other countries in Europe and the Middle East could follow, with some already showing an interest. <\/p>\n
BAE has developed Brontanax alongside the Royal Air Force, in a project dating back to 2022, and already has a fully assembled aircraft at its Warton facility in north west England. It could enter service by \u200c2030, BAE said. <\/p>\n
That timeline compares to Boeing’s MQ-28 GhostBat, on \u200bdisplay at Farnborough, which has already started flight testing, and could \u200bbe flying for Australia by 2028. <\/p>\n
BAE said \u200bits CCA offered more stealth than rivals and it was aiming for it to \u200chave 70-80% of the capabilities of a fighter \u200bjet and to come \u200bin at under 25% of the cost, which could give it a price tag of around $25 million. <\/p>\n
Its open architecture and modular design will allow software upgrades and changes to easily be made, \u200bwith BAE looking at non-military suppliers \u200cto help with the build. <\/p>\n
Britain said in its defence investment plan earlier in July that \u200bit would spend an initial \u00a3300 million to launch a sovereign CCA programme it has named \u200bStorm Fighter. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Sarah Young; Editing by Joe Brock) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Sarah Young FARNBOROUGH, England, July 22 (Reuters) – BAE Systems revealed a new unmanned fighter jet on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[299,14,1039,2508,2509],"class_list":["post-4205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-bae-systems","tag-defence-industry","tag-farnborough-airshow","tag-fighter-jet","tag-flight-testing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}