BAE Systems unveiled Brontanax, described as the UK's first British-designed Collaborative Combat Aircraft. The company self-funded the program from an initial concept in 2022 with several hundred million pounds of investment. Brontanax is roughly the size of a Hawk trainer, sits in the over-5-tonne maximum-takeoff-weight class, and uses a low-observable delta-wing configuration with canted tails and a single engine fed by a chin intake. BAE says the design targets 70 to 80 percent of a Typhoon's capabilities at 20 to 25 percent of the cost, and the platform is being pitched at the RAF's newly announced £300 million Storm Fighter procurement. Ground testing is scheduled for early 2027, first flight for Q2 2027.

The Read: Brontanax is the next visible step in the European sovereign-sixth-generation arc that has been building for two years, and it lands as a direct answer to the industrial fragmentation the FCAS collapse exposed. When the Franco-German fighter program broke down over irreconcilable national requirements last year, the strategic question for European air power became whether any continental partner could still bring a credible sixth-generation capability to service before 2035. Brontanax is the platform BAE offers: a self-funded, sovereign-designed CCA aimed at operational relevance by 2030 that can then hand its autonomy stack and teaming software forward to GCAP's crewed sixth-generation fighter when it arrives. The wider bet is that established-airframe economics have shifted decisively in favor of designs that scale. A Hawk-sized loyal wingman built in Lancashire at 20 percent of Typhoon cost is the industrial answer to a threat environment where mass has re-emerged as a warfighting variable.

Anduril and Archer Aviation unveiled Thunder, a Group 5 autonomous tiltrotor combat drone, designed as a loyal wingman for the AH-64 Apache and the future MV-75 Cheyenne II. Thunder is a hybrid-electric aircraft with Optimum-Speed Tiltrotor technology drawn from Karem Aircraft, a cruise speed above 200 knots, a range extending to thousands of nautical miles, and an acoustic signature Anduril describes as a fraction of an Apache's. Two reconfigurable payload bays can carry up to ten air-to-ground missiles, 76 APKWS II rockets, or 16 launched effects, with the nose bay reserved for kinetic counter-drone interceptors, addressing the air-to-air FPV threat that has emerged in Ukraine. Autonomy runs on Anduril's Lattice software with a passive-sensor stack for nap-of-the-earth flight in GPS-denied environments; first flight is targeted for 2027, and Anduril has already been selected for the British Army's Project NYX program to pair drone wingmen with Apaches. The reveal moves the crewed-uncrewed teaming concept out of the fighter force and into rotary-wing attack aviation.

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