Leonardo UK has announced a contract from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) worth around EUR 134 M that will launch the next stage of the Excalibur Flight Test Aircraft (FTA) project. The company made the announcement on 14 July 2023 on the first day of this year’s Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT 2023), held at RAF Fairford.
The Excalibur project is a key part of the UK’s Future Combat Air System (FCAS)/Tempest sixth-generation fighter programme, which in turn is central to the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP): an international collaboration between the UK, Italy and Japan.
Under this latest stage of the Excalibur project a Boeing 757 aircraft will be completely overhauled and turned into a flying laboratory for combat air technology.
Talking to journalists at RIAT on 14 July, Andrew Howard, director of Future Combat Air/GCAP at Leonardo UK, said the contract, which was signed earlier that week, was a “vote of confidence” in the Tempest/GCAP technology demonstrator programmes. He added that the Excalibur FTA, which is scheduled to make its first flight in 2026, would take Leonardo’s work on future sensor integration and fusion “beyond the lab to a flying aircraft purchased earlier this year”.
This aircraft, a commercial Boeing 757 airliner bought from charter flight company Titan Airways, has already been delivered to the facility of Leonardo’s test and evaluation partner, 2Excel, in Lasham, Hampshire. The announced contract will cover the physical modification of the 757, as well as flight tests, certification and the work required to secure approval from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).
An initial design phase of the Excalibur project saw 2Excel acquire a retired, engineless 757 airframe and take it apart piece by piece to fully understand its construction and build up a digital twin of the airframe. This was also required so that Leonardo and 2Excel would be able provide the appropriate regulatory evidence and design information to the CAA to allow the second, modified 757 to be certified for flight.
The Excalibur FTA will be adapted to host integrated sensors, non-kinetic effects (ISANKE) and integrated communications systems (ICS) that Leonardo and its international partners are developing as part of GCAP.
“It’s about testing data fusion in an airborne environment,” said Howard. Asked by ESD to what extent the 757-based Excalibur FTA could replicate a sixth-generation fighter, Howard said the test flight programme would be looking to strike a balance between gathering pure data and looking to replicate the conditions that would apply to a fast jet.
With ground-based testing also happening in parallel to the Excalibur flight test campaign, Howard said that the project is “hoping to take a big chunk out of overall work required” to provide an integrated future-generation sensor suite for Tempest/GCAP, which is due to be delivered from 2035.
The UK Tempest partners – BAE Systems, Leonardo UK, Rolls-Royce and MBDA – are working together with the UK MoD on a range of test and demonstration activities, including Excalibur, to enable the successful delivery of GCAP in the required timeline.
Peter Felstead
