Efforts will also support early iterations of UK’s Tempest.
Tony Osborne
BAE Systems has developed this wide-area display with independently powered, high-integrity panels. Credit: Ray Troll/BAE Systems
Although a road map for the evolution of the Eurofighter Typhoon has yet to be firmed up by the partner nations, industry has begun laying the foundation for upgrades that will keep the Euro-Canard fighter aircraft relevant into the 2040s and ’50s.
The development work being done on BAE Systems’ own dime will also support the UK’s Tempest Future Combat Air System, as the UK aims to reuse proven Typhoon technology in the first iterations of the Tempest crewed platform.
It has been nearly three years since the Typhoon partners began working on the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) initiative, a midlife update aimed at refreshing the mission systems, introducing a new cockpit layout and updating the defensive capabilities of the four-nation combat aircraft.
Although the LTE has yet to be fully signed off on by the partner nations, the extent of the upgrade effort is only now becoming clear. At the LTE’s heart is essentially a rearchitecting of the Typhoon’s avionics and mission systems, separating out safety-critical and mission-critical software from their federalized state.
BAE has established test rigs to allow engineers to experiment with real aircraft software. They also are studying new hardware, including multicore processors, that the company says will deliver computing power 300 times greater than processors and black boxes in place now.
Because the current system is federalized, every time new features are added to the aircraft, including new weapons integrations, “you have to go through the whole safety debate again,” says Anthony Gregory, BAE Systems market and strategy development director.
As an inherently unstable fly-by-wire aircraft—due to its center of gravity being aft of the center of the aircraft—the fly-by-wire, canard-equipped Typhoon is heavily dependent on its flight control computers in subsonic flight, and any potential impact from new code must be carefully managed.
“Splitting out the functionality in that manner allows us to do rapid prototyping and rapid updates of the platform and the mission-critical elements—the bits that drive operational capability,” explains Chris Hodson, product technical manager for the Typhoon LTE program at BAE Systems.
A similar approach has been adopted by Saab for its Gripen E platform and is the aspiration for Europe’s next-generation combat aircraft.
As the code is separated, elements of it are being rewritten to enable the use of Pyramid, the BAE Systems-developed, UK Defense Ministry-funded open-systems architecture that is intended to become the backbone of platforms such as the Tempest eventually.
The OEM also is narrowing options for a potential new wide-area display (WAD) configuration for the Typhoon’s cockpit, which will eliminate the head-up display (HUD), transferring the information displayed on the HUD into a helmet-mounted sight.
The WAD has been designed primarily to provide mission information, displaying the radar and threat picture as well as high-definition imagery from sensors such as the aircraft’s targeting pod and the active, electronically scanned array (AESA) radars currently in development.
“What [the WAD] brings us is an ability to keep situational awareness at a far greater range than would have been possible with the three independent small screens,” says Andrew Mallery-Blythe, BAE’s Typhoon operational requirements manager.
On either side of the WAD are what engineers call high-integrity panels—smart-tablet, display-size screens that show flight safety data.
BAE’s aim is to mature the cockpit concepts and the new mission system architecture technologies enough for a potential flight demonstration by the end of 2023. That could enable both to be fully matured as components for the LTE initiative by 2030.
At the same time, the goal is to provide a similar cockpit configuration for the first iterations of the Tempest crewed fighter when it enters service in the mid-2030s, ahead of the cockpits with augmented reality technology that have previously been associated with Tempest development.
“The augmented reality cockpits represent the level of aspiration,” Gregory says. “There is a journey to get there, and the technologies we are looking at here are on that journey.”
