The 'hangar', or the Aviation Concepts Environment (ACE), will
open up to Dstl, Front Line Commands and invited industry
partners.
The ACE is due to open
its digital doors in December 2023, and is not only for
generation-after-next concepts. It’s also for anything which has
the potential to protect and enhance the UK Armed Forces’ fleet
of tactical aircraft.
Successful internal testing now means a beta version of
the ACE is ready for
launch. This happens as the Defence Science and Technology
Laboratory (Dstl)-led
Tactical Aviation Contested, Degraded and Operationally
(T-CDO)
limiting environments Integrating Capability Challenge
(ICC)
continues to gather speed.
The OS-accredited and cloud-hosted online platform will become a
key enabler of the 4-year ICC initiative. This
initiative seeks to pull through science and technology-based
platform and operator solutions to the problems posed by the
complexity of a fast-changing battlespace.
Developed in partnership with QinetiQ Training & Simulation,
the ACE will serve as a
centralised repository for gathering concepts from across the
Ministry of Defence (MOD) and industry enterprise that
address front line command-identified challenges and capability
gaps for tactical aircraft.
Dstl will
carry out initial operational analysis of ACE concepts within a
set of endorsed scenarios as part of our systematic approach to
rapidly exploiting technological advancements.
Liam Ball, Project Technical Authority for the Tactical Aviation
CDO programme, said the ACE represented an
important first leg of a concept’s flight path from inception to
exploitation and would be fully operational before April 2024.
“Engagement is key – this doesn’t work without it, and we really
need early engagement with the ACE for it to inform,
via thorough analysis and testing, the procurement of kit that is
needed to ultimately save lives.”
Tactical Aviation CDO’s mission is to increase the probability of
mission success, through novel engineering and logistical
solutions, and improve mission outcomes via both platform and
operator technologies.
Tactical Aviation CDO’s collaborative approach to landing the UK
and its allies an operational advantage was clear during its
latest stakeholder engagement event. This event brought together
delegates from across the Armed Forces, academia and industry for
a shared first glance at some innovative concepts.
Among those in attendance was Group Captain Steve Austin, Royal
Air Force. He described the drive to combat aviation challenges
(the proliferation in the use of drones, increasing
sophistication of tactical surface-to-air missiles and the cyber
and electronic warfare capabilities of adversaries) as a ‘team
sport’:
“We need to be able to share those challenges so collectively
people can come up with the ideas to solve them.
“To know that you have got other organisations such
as Dstl, who are
friendly forces, working on your side and also engaging with
academia and industry to try and bring collective intellectual
rigour to some of our problems is quite reassuring.”
To find out more about the ACE or request access
to the beta version, email the project team: TacticalAviationCDO@dstl.gov.uk
