Italy details its GCAP participation
December 23, 2024
At least two of the three Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) partners organised press briefings to discuss the signature of the Joint Venture agreement on 13 December. Herman Claesen, Managing Director FCAS at BAE Systems briefed journalists (under embargo) that morning, while Guglielmo Maviglia, Chief Global Combat Air Programme Officer, and Lorenzo Mariani, Leonardo Co-General Manager briefed Italian media on 17 December.
They revealed that the Italian NATCO (national company) will be the leader in four domains, flight system integration, weapons integration, training integration, and in two activities for the mission system (the weapons effect management system and the flight control system), with considerable artificial intelligence content. The sectors or domains allocated to the UK and Japan remain unknown.
Guglielmo Maviglia outlined the new way of collaborating, which will see an innovative co-operation in which clusters of engineers from the three nations will work together at the different sites. This will see Italy ensuring co-ordination in the different domain sectors for which it is responsible, but with input from both UK and Japanese engineers and companies. Herman Claesen had described the same kind of co-operative working, but did not say that this co-operation scheme would be adopted (only) for all key activities linked to sixth generation aspects, while more conventional elements would be assigned to single nations for development!
The future JV will operate across four main sites, including the headquarters in the United Kingdom (believed to be in Reading, Berkshire), and at three national main sites. The main Italian site will be at Torino Caselle (currently home to the Italian Eurofighter final assembly line), but work will also be undertaken at Leonardo facilities in Rome, Pomezia (whose planned closure has been cancelled), Florence and Nerviano, and with tier one subcontractors including Avio, the ELT Group, MBDA, and Umbra.
