The British Ministry of Defense has just awarded Rolls Royce, BAE Systems and Reaction Engines a £10m contract to develop an aircraft engine operating at a high supersonic speed, i.e. between Mach 4 and Mach 5 , i.e. the commonly accepted limit of hypersonic speed. The objective is, according to the Chief of Staff of the Royal Air Force, to be able to quickly have this technology in order to be able to integrate it into its arsenal, taking care to specify that one should not, however, expect see a Typhoon hypersonics emerge in the years to come.
Indeed, this program, like others launched recently, is intended to provide a technological building block for the Tempest program, so as to give aeronautical designers and staffs the widest range of available and reliable technologies to design the aircraft(s) of the program, whether piloted or autonomous. This approach is also reminiscent of the one towards which the British switched the FCAS program of Franco-British combat drones, which was interpreted as a retreat from London by Paris.
In reality, the British took, for the Tempest, a paradigm radically opposed to that chosen by France, Germany and Spain for the FCAS, based on the development of technological bricks on the one hand, and the integration of this bricks to design the aircraft(s) of the other. On the FCAS side, the paradigm is based on the development of an integrated system, including its own technological stages. This is the method that was used for the Rafale, but with a more limited technological gap than that awaiting the FCAS.
The British method is also, paradoxically, the direct application of the recommendations made by GIFAS, and its President E. Trappier, in 2016, during the presidential campaign, and which specifically recommended separating the technological research part into demonstrator programs. , of the weapon system part in major programs. Proceeding in this way offers, in fact, numerous advantages, such as greater adaptability and responsiveness to new technologies which are sure to appear by 2040, reducing the risks of technological impasses slowing down the program and causing it to explode its costs, and above all, the possibility of being able to simultaneously integrate the same technological bricks into several sub-programs, depending on their degree of maturity.
However, Rolls-Royce, BAe, like the entire British defense aeronautical industry, have been able to observe closely the excesses of an integrated approach in the F35 program, to which the British BITD contributes up to 14%. It is therefore not surprising to note antagonistic approaches between the Tempest program and the American program.
Regardless, through this program, the RAF is opening a door to high-speed performance of the Tempest, without rushing the program. One thing is certain, the Tempest program mobilizes a lot in the United Kingdom…