What happens when you put a Cold War veteran and a sixth-generation stealth fighter together? Britain’s newest aerospace experiment had the answer in a nose cone 3D-printed from titanium that was once attached to a Panavia Tornado.
The “Tornado 2 Tempest” project is the Royal Air Force’s first, a partnership between the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Recycling & Disposals Team, the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) programme, Rolls-Royce, and Additive Manufacturing Solutions (AMS) from Lancashire. The process is attractively easy to describe: break up retired Tornado planes, remove strategic metals such as high-grade titanium, atomize them into fine powder and pump that powder into additive manufacturing systems to create parts for the UK’s next-generation Tempest fighter.
The engineering breakthrough comes in the process of transformation. Tornado low-pressure air compressor blades made of titanium were atomised, cleaned, and reformed into a 3D-printed nose cone and fresh compressor blades for Rolls-Royce’s small engine demonstrator Orpheus. The engine serves as a testbed under the FCAS programme, used to test propulsion ideas for Tempest. In the recent trial, the reused nose cone was mounted on an Orpheus test engine and cleared all safety and suitability tests a key proof point that reused aerospace-grade titanium can achieve the strict tolerances of combat flight.
Andrew Eady, Vice President for FCAS Sustainability at Rolls-Royce, referred to the initiative as “a bold, exciting and innovative project and a demonstration of how excellent collaboration between the MOD, industry and SME can deliver sustainable and technologically advanced solutions.” The initiative also features an integrated Digital Product Passport system, tracking the provenance and lifetime of each recycled component to protect against fake parts and provide accurate allocation of limited resources.
The argument for sustainability is met with strategic imperatives. Squadron Leader Rob, FCAS Sustainability Requirements Manager, said that through the expected lifecycle of the UK’s FCAS, we expect access to critical materials to be challenged, as global supply chains become increasingly disrupted and competitive. By recovering titanium from retired aircraft, the UK decreases reliance on unstable global markets while reducing costs and lead times to production. Parts manufactured in this manner are also lighter, stronger, and longer-lasting than traditionally forged parts, states the MoD.
The Tornado itself, launched in 1979, was a tri-national engineering product of the UK, Germany, and Italy, renowned for its swing-wing style and low-level strike capacity. Its strengthened frame and terrain-following radar made it a Cold War force to be reckoned with, and subsequently a workhorse of the Gulf, Balkans, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Whilst the RAF decommissioned its final Tornado GR4 in 2019, the airframe’s high-quality materials are turning out to be too good to relegate to museums and scrapheaps.
For Tempest, the recycling program aligns with a wider adoption of advanced manufacturing. BAE Systems intends to apply additive manufacturing on about 30 percent of the structure of the aircraft, in addition to robotic assembly, digital twins, and model-based systems engineering. The Combat Air Flying Demonstrator a stealthy, twin-engine test vehicle that looks like an F-35 but has no horizontal stabilizers is currently in production, with more than two-thirds of its structural weight already manufactured. It will take to the skies in 2027 to test Tempest’s aerodynamics, stealth paint, and integrated systems prior to the operational aircraft entering service in about 2035.
Tempest’s ambitions are grand: an optionally manned platform with “really extreme range,” a payload capability approximately twice that of the F-35A, and integrated sensor systems such as ISANKE and ICS that can collect 10,000 times as much data as today’s radars. Rolls-Royce is working on a new powerplant with ten times the electrical output of Typhoon engines, an integrated starter generator, and next-generation thermal management to enable directed-energy weapons and high-demand avionics. The Orpheus demonstrator, now partially constructed from Tornado material, is a stepping stone to that propulsion future.
Funding for Tornado 2 Tempest is provided by UK Strategic Command’s Defence Support Organisation under its Circular Economics for Defence Concept Note. Already, the project has generated employment at AMS and will create further jobs as the technology is made available to other suppliers. It has also won a Chief of Defence Logistics and Support Commendation for its frontline readiness contribution.
As Defence Procurement Minister Maria Eagle explained, By working with key industry partners, we can deliver savings, reduce reliance on global supply chains and ensure our Armed Forces have the very best kit to keep our country safe. That kit in this instance might bear the DNA of an aircraft that was conceived to fly low and fast across Cold War Europe reimagined in the stealth lines of Britain’s future air superiority fighter.
