It seems likely that the BAE Mantis airframe will provide the base for this UAV, if so then 5 years should be doable.
Definitely agree it should be a 'purple' asset.
Sounds a lot but a E2/C2 has a wingspan of nearly 25 metres.
I wonder where this leaves Taranis?
In exactly the same place, this is a MALE UAV project primarily for reconnaissance, Taranis is a demonstrator for a pentrating UCAV, completely different roles.
There's been talk of a jet-engined Mantis derivative. This sounds like it. 5 years & 1 billion Euros to scale up Mantis a bit, fit jets, integrate sensors, test . . . seems enough.
I hadn't even considered that this would be larger than Mantis, should of checked my dimensions a bit, it sounds more like a cross between a Reaper and a Global Hawk.
I was thinking more would this lead the way for a similar joint approach with the French. The nEUROn seems to be in the same space and cooperation with France is flavour of the month.
The large size will hopefully allow for a very high pay load and incredibly long endurance, hopefully it will come mounted with two engines with built-in redundancy should one engine fail. If it can't land on a QE class then lets at least hope the vessel will have the ability to access real time information, the same way UK ground stations at Creech/Waddington can monitor live Reaper feed from Afghanistan. Having a containerized mobile ground station or smaller mirrored equivalent permanently fitted aboard a QE would provide the resident Admiral/RM BG Commander with constant eyes on.
Fair point, a clipped wing version could clearly fit and still be reasonably practical if 28 is too much.
To me it seems like a no brainer to bring land based UAV's to sea, my only concern is the need to increase the landing carriage height/strength to avoid the payload being damaged during landing and/or take-off in above average sea states.
Seems reasonable. Succssful carrier aircraft have pretty much always been designed as such from the start. Things like Seafire were compromised.
It'd probably be as part of a solution - use the P8's for the boomer channel clearance, ASW work and some more targeted surveillance and use UAV's to do general maritime surveillance - they're cheaper by a massive factor to run and it'd be easy to keep several in the air at any time to cover the English channel and the oilfields for instance.
Yes a small number of P8's and a small number of maritime recon UAV's would be more efficient than a larger number of Nimrods. Rebuilding small numbers of Nimrods was a disaster - twice! AEW and MR4 - just like Sea Sprite in RAN.