All week, “Un monde d’avance” focuses on the “war of advance”: focus on the main innovations in defense. First part: the heaviest programs – financially speaking: those which aim to produce a 6th generation fighter-bomber.
It will replace the French Rafale, the British or German Typhoon and the American F18 and F22… But only one thing is sure for the moment: the 6th generation fighter will not be just a combat aircraft, but a larger system or device… Whatever the projects – European and American, essentially – it will indeed include a manned, ultra-stealth combat aircraft; combat drones moving around the aircraft and a large and instantaneous communication system capable, for example, of receiving intelligence from the ground, other aircraft in flight or from satellites and of commanding fire, for example from a missile destroyer. It’s called a “battle cloud“.
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For the moment, the projects are only identified by acronyms. For the Franco-Hispano-German project, to which Belgium has just joined, it is the SCAF, the Air Combat System of the Future; the British, in cooperation with the Italians and the Japanese are working together on a GCAP for Global Combat Air Programme. As for the Americans, they have launched two 6th generation aircraft projects: the NGAD (New Generation Air Dominance) of the US Air Force and the FA-XX of the US Navy which should be able to operate from its aircraft carriers, and of which we do not know much except that it will be expensive: the Navy for example, has just requested for the fiscal year 2024 an envelope of one and a half billion dollars to finance its development. The estimated total cost of these programs is staggering anyway. More than 300 billion dollars for the American NGAD; around 100 billion euros for the European SCAF or the European-Japanese GCAP…
For the Europeans – whether it is the SCAF or the GCAP – we have not yet gone beyond the level of the drawing board. Since 2019, the designers of the SCAF (for the plane, Dassault is the leader) have presented at the Paris Air Show a full-scale model of what their 6th generation aircraft could be. But the final architecture is not fixed; In fact “5 different architectures are in the boxes”, specifies Air Division General Jean-Luc Moritz, project manager for the SCAF; “one more furtive, the other more manoeuvrable”… A demonstrator, that is to say a pre-prototype of the SCAF, should not take to the air before 2028; same objective for GCAP.
The Americans, on the other hand, and even if they remain very discreet on this subject, have already flown three demonstrators since 2020. A few weeks ago, Lockheed-Martin circulated on social networks the general design of one of these demonstrators ; last year, a satellite photo taken above the notorious secret air base Area 51 appeared to reveal another one of these demonstrators…unless it’s a decoy.
The Americans, in any case, seem sufficiently advanced to announce as early as 2024 a call for tenders to aeronautical manufacturers to no longer build a demonstrator, but rather a 6th generation aircraft, which should be able to be deployed at the end of the decade. For Europeans, we are aiming for the next decade, that is to say around 2040.