Middle East money targets pioneering jet trainer

British military jet developer, Aeralis, has signed an initial £10.5 million ($14.5 million) investment agreement with an as-yet unnamed “Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund”.

This new injection of finance will be used to support the design, development and first flight of the company’s innovative Advanced Jet Trainer (AJT) platform.

Earlier this year, the start-up agreed a three-year contract with the UK Royal Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) for research and development into a new modular approach to the design and development of future aircraft.

Aeralis is expected to make further announcements about its new funding partner later this year or early next – and it could be that the timing of these will identify the partner, which is perhaps why the company is not saying whether it will occur at the Dubai Air Show or at the new Saudi World Defence Show!

Tristan Crawford, Aeralis CEO and chief designer, believes the conclusion of this investment agreement promises to “disrupt the defence aviation space, and really create new capability”.

Just as importantly, he said, it will provide “a lot of much-improved efficiency for military customers in the combat air space”.

Crawford hailed the deal as a “transformational moment”, underlining that the sovereign wealth fund backers were “very big supporters of this concept”.

With British Aerospace rolling the very last Hawks off its Brough production line, there is an obvious gap in the market for the new Aeralis trainer, and it’s one that Crawford is eager to fill.

“Our view is that it’s time to realise what life looks like after Hawk,” he said.

“The market is going to need a new vision – a new kind of system. I don’t think we’ll see the past being repeated; we’re entering a new world where militaries will be using uncrewed and crewed flying.”

Crawford added: “The successor to Hawk is going to have to address those questions, with much more flexibility and operational capability, with much harder targets in terms of cost efficiency.”

The CEO makes no bones about admiring the aircraft that he’s aiming to replace. “We’re fans of the Hawk; we grew up with the Hawk; I worked on the Hawk,” he said. “Obviously, it’s very important for us, as fans of that kind of British ingenuity, to see that continue.

“I made the decision to start the company, to really try and take that concept forward, to make sure that British ingenuity stays alive and well, and that we continue to deliver the best of British into that market.

He is confident that Aeralis can deliver a replacement for Hawk in terms of capability and jobs.

“We are absolutely passionate that the capability we have in the UK to create a new aeroplane of this size is all there; we just need to do it,” he said.

Aeralis is targeting a wide range of potential customers, but existing Hawk operators (many of them in the Middle East) are a natural fit for the advanced trainer version, and for some of the other Aeralis-variants, manned and unmanned, that are now being highlighted.

These include a light fighter, a close air support aircraft, but also an unmanned tanker, an intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance (ISTAR)-roled remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS), and even a ‘loyal wingman’ type unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV).

“The UK has done an incredible job in installing, around the world, an aircraft that is loved by air forces everywhere. The thought of that diminishing because we’re losing Hawk (obviously, the production of Hawk is stopping) is not, in our view, a good thing,” said Crawford.

“You’re seeing a supply chain that amounts to around about 4,000 jobs, which are going to be at risk if we haven’t got something that replaces Hawk,” he concluded.