“Operational sovereignty depends on indigenous industrial capacity,” said Iain McNicoll, former chairman of the RAS’s Air Power Group and a former Air Marshall in the RAF.
“The defence aerospace sector should be treated the same as nuclear, shipbuilding and complex weapons are – ie it is vital to sustain UK industry in this sector. Without a high-end design-and-build capacity in aerospace, we would lose a critical national capability.”
He accepts the UK is “unlikely” to build another manned combat aircraft alone and that “any high-end project requires European collaboration”. However, he warns that a reliance on being part of US-led programmes could hit the UK’s sovereignty because of America’s ITAR scheme, which controls sharing technology.
McNicoll believes one of the best hopes for Britain retaining high-end aerospace skills and technology is the £1.5bn that the UK and France have committed to developing a prototype Future Combat Air System (FCAS) – an unmanned warplane that could be the basis of future European air forces.