British Military Aviation And Updates

Reaction Engines Ltd and Rolls-Royce plc today announced a new strategic partnership agreement to develop high-speed aircraft propulsion systems and explore applications for Reaction Engines’ thermal management technology within civil and defence aerospace gas turbine engines and hybrid-electric systems.

“This strategic partnership is about developing market ready applications for Reaction Engines’ technology in next generation engines and is a significant step forward for our technology commercialisation plans,” said Mark Thomas, Chief Executive of Reaction Engines. Our proprietary heat exchanger technology delivers incredible heat transfer capabilities at extremely low weight and a compact size. We look forward to expanding our international collaboration with Rolls-Royce, a global leader in power systems, to bring to market a range of applications that will transform the performance and efficiency of aircraft engines, enable high speed – supersonic and hypersonic – flight and support the drive towards more sustainable aviation through innovative new technologies.”


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im telling you. By 2030 we will be offered one of their carriers :ROFLMAO:
 
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Typhoon, C-130J and Puma retirements, FCAS investment headline UK defence review

The UK will retire its Tranche 1 Eurofighter Typhoons, Lockheed Martin C-130J tactical transports and Airbus Helicopters Puma HC2 rotorcraft by the middle of this decade, as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) targets a range of capability updates.

Detailed within a Command Paper publication released on 22 March titled Defence in a competitive age, and covering the period to 2025, the MoD’s plan also includes major new investment in a future combat air system (FCAS) project, but provides only vague details on its total commitment to the stealthy Lockheed Martin F-35B.

Around 24 of the Royal Air Force’s (RAF’s) oldest Typhoons will leave service by 2025, with the saved support funds to be channelled into upgrades to its more modern Tranche 2 and 3 jets. This will include integrating MBDA’s Spear 3 air-to-surface missile and an active electronically scanned array radar. The service will continue to sustain its current seven-squadron strength with the type, including a joint unit formed with Qatar’s air force.

More than £2 billion ($2.77 billion) will be invested in the FCAS activity by 2025, with the report detailing new investment from the UK worth £1.2 billion of this total. Work on the project – which also involves Italy and Sweden – will include advancing a manned or unmanned Tempest fighter, plus supporting capabilities including an unmanned Mosquito ‘loyal wingman’ and what the report refers to as “swarming drones”.

The report also commits to “grow the [F-35B] Lightning II force, increasing the fleet size beyond the 48 aircraft that we have already ordered”. No further detail about this plan has been released, but it is expected to cover the acquisition of additional examples within the coming years to ensure that this number of aircraft – required to ensure continuation of the UK’s Carrier Strike capability with the Royal Navy’s two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers for the next several decades – is safeguarded.

A decision on potentially reducing the UK’s programme of record requirement to eventually acquire 138 F-35s appears to have been deferred until the time of its next strategic defence review in 2025.

Meanwhile, a project to replace the RAF’s Boeing 707-based E-3D Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft with five 737-derived E-7A Wedgetails has been cut back to just three airframes. The MoD last year ordered a trio of 737NGs for conversion into the surveillance type, plus two secondhand airframes sourced via Boeing for modification by STS Aviation Services. The first of these arrived at the company’s facility at Birmingham airport in early January.

Retirement of the RAF’s stretched-fuselage C-130J-30s by 2023 will see “the A400M Atlas force increase its capacity and capability”, the MoD says. The first operator of the “Super Hercules”, the UK has previously withdrawn its short-fuselage C-130Js and sold the surplus assets to Bahrain, Bangladesh and the US Navy.

A pair of BAe 146 transports acquired secondhand to support operations in Afghanistan will also leave use next year.

Use of the Puma rotorcraft will be brought to an end in the 2023-2025 period, with a replacement medium-weight helicopter to be acquired.

The MoD has not provided further details of this proposal, but notes: “The army is retiring its oldest CH-47 Chinook helicopters and investing, alongside the US, in newer variants of this operationally proven aircraft, enhancing capability, efficiency and interoperability. Investment in a new medium-lift helicopter in the mid-2020s will enable a consolidation of the army’s disparate fleet of medium-lift helicopters from four platform types to one,” it adds (in fact, the RAF operates both the Chinook and Puma fleets).

In the training sector, the RAF’s remaining British Aerospace Hawk T1 trainers will leave use by 2023, apart from those assigned to the Red Arrows aerobatic display team, which will continue to fly the type until 2030. “We will enhance the new military flying training system with further investment in synthetic training that will deliver more capable pilots more quickly and more efficiently,” it adds.

“The development of novel technologies, and a step change in how we use simulators for mission rehearsal and training, will enable the Royal Air Force to be among the most technologically innovative, productive and lethal air forces in the world,” the report states.

“The Royal Air Force will conduct a radical overhaul of how it is organised and how it approaches its people, training, bases and the aircraft and equipment it operates, harnessing the ever increasing effectiveness of a digitally empowered force,” says the report.

This will include measures intended to “amplify UK global influence by deepening our alliances in the Indo Pacific, Middle East and Africa [and] developing a global network of adaptable basing with key allies and partners,” it adds.

Such a shift will also be supported by the development from next year of an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellite constellation.
 

Paddy, this here takes the cake. I mean what exactly does the Tempest project have in common with Japanese 5th Gen FA project. Yet, that's how RR is spinning it.

They're off to Japan hat in hand claiming a collaboration whereas in all likelihood the Japanese would pass on jobworking activities to RR who likely will pass it on to DRDO / HAL given the recent collaboration they entered into with Indian entities & pocket the difference thus living upto the old reputation Brits gained in the Far East as traders or middlemen.

If only BJ opened up the country's purse strings, your crown jewels wouldn't be in such a tattered shape.

I think the time's right for SAFRAN to attempt a hostile takeover of RR. Even BJ, hypocrite that he's, won't object merely make noises in that restroom aka the House of Commons.

@BMD
 
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RR comes up with a propeller based "fully electric aircraft" , claims it has broken all records especially as far as it's speed goes , produces a glitzy video & doesn't give us any particulars. Not about it's speed or it's endurance or the records it established or broke.

This is what RR has been reduced to .
 
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Military bunkers in the UK are being upgraded so they can be used to store US nuclear weapons again after 14 years of standing empty, according to US defence budget documents.
In the Biden administration’s 2023 defence budget request, the UK was added to the list of countries where infrastructure investment is under way at “special weapons” storage sites, alongside Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey – all countries where the US stores an estimated 100 B61 nuclear bombs.

Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), who first reported on the budget item, said he believed the British site being upgraded is the US airbase at RAF Lakenheath, 100 km north-east of London.
The US withdrew its B61 munitions from Lakenheath in 2008, marking the end of more than half a century of maintaining a US nuclear stockpile in the UK. At the time of the withdrawal, the gravity bombs were widely seen as militarily obsolete and hopes were higher for further disarmament by the nuclear weapons powers.
That optimism has since been dashed, against the backdrop of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, his regime’s nuclear threats against Nato, and extensive nuclear weapon modernisation programmes pursued by both the US and Russia. As part of the US plan, the B61 has been given a new lease of life with a guidance system, the B61-12 variant, due to go into full production in May.

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The 2023 budget request says that Nato “is wrapping up a 13-year, $384m infrastructure investment program at storage sites in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and Turkey to upgrade security measures, communication systems, and facilities”.
In the 1990s, RAF Lakenheath had 33 underground storage vaults, where 110 B61 bombs were stored, according to the FAS. Since their withdrawal the vaults have been mothballed. Kristensen said he believes the vaults are now being upgraded so the new B61-12 bombs can be stored there, if needed.

The Biden administration has been careful not to make any moves that might be seen as escalatory in the nuclear arena in response to Putin’s announcement he would put Russia’s nuclear forces on higher alert a few days after his invasion of Ukraine. The US has cancelled scheduled tests of its intercontinental ballistic missiles, for example.

For the same reason, Kristensen said he doubted the Biden administration is planning to increase the US nuclear stockpile in Europe. When the new B61-12 bombs are delivered, expected next year, they will replace older models already there. Instead, he thought the Lakenheath upgrade is intended to provided more flexibility to move the nuclear weapons around Europe.
“One of the things they have talked about is protecting the deterrent against Russia’s improved cruise missiles capabilities,” Kristensen said. “So they could be trying to beef up the readiness of more sites without them necessarily receiving nukes, so that they have the options to move things around in a contingency if they need to.”

Britain has become keen to take a more assertive role when it comes to its own nuclear deterrent, and last year announced it would increase its own stockpile of Trident nuclear warheads by 40% to 260, the first such increase since the end of the cold war. Whitehall sources say the UK has “a clearer appreciation” of its role as a nuclear weapons state in a renewed era of state competition with Russia and China.
The UK Ministry of Defence did not comment on the upgrade mentioned in the US budget. One British official said: “We won’t provide anything on this as it relates to the storage of nuclear weapons.” But the news comes just four months after the arrival in Lakenheath of the first of a new generation of nuclear-capable US combat aircraft, the F-35A Lightning II, the first such deployment in Europe.
Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, said the upgrade of the UK storage facilities is “an early sign that the US and Nato are preparing to engage in a protracted and maybe heightened standoff with Putin’s Russia”.
“The administration should provide some clarity about the military necessity and goals of possibly bringing nuclear weapons back to the UK,” Kimball added.



The developments in Europe are part of a broader retreat from arms control. The Biden administration’s nuclear posture review, which has been sent to Congress but not yet declassified, is reported not to contain the changes the president pledged during his campaign.
In 2020, he said he would formally declare the sole purpose of nuclear weapons to be deterrence of a nuclear attack against the United States or its allies. But the review leaves open the option of using nuclear arms to respond to non-nuclear threats as well.
The nuclear disarmament group CND said the “quiet announcement” by the US amounted to more militarisation at a time of growing risk and would add to the risks faced by the British public. Kate Hudson, the general secretary of CND, said she feared it could lead to US warheads being redeployed in the UK. “Nuclear weapons don’t make us safe – they make us a target,” she added.
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I guess we crashed more Sea Harriers than retired them .

But what's this sweetie , I was astounded to know the STOVL technology of your beloved F-35 B was based on the Russian Yak -141 where the latter signed a ToT agreement for 400 million USD with LM to deliver 3 aircrafts & a TD ?? In retrospect that's probably why this turned out into being such a troubled product . I mean you could always blame it on the Russkies now .

Further a RN pilot or probably a USMC pilot goes on to brag that STOVL take off & landings which used to be such a stressful affair with the Harriers are a piece of cake with the F-35 B .

Poor chappie ! Who's to inform him of the multiple accidents that the F-35B underwent while taking off or landing ? But then this documentary was produced nearly 2 yrs ago when false pride in an advanced but unsubstantially engineered complex yet not fully realised or understood product was paramount.

I'm still awaiting your answer from your butt buddy Gen Hostage as to why didn't he incorporate the ATOL system into the F-35 B instead of chasing sci fi , pie in the sky E Virus like Stuxnet .

@Innominate
 
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