Europe’s UCAV demonstrator : A Structuring Project for the European Defence Industry.

For the next twenty years, the European Combat Aircraft Industry has to face three main challenges:

• The development of the strategic technologies that the US are mastering – or will master – and that will never be transferred to Europe;
• Upholding of its skill and excellency. In a lot of areas, European industry has technical competence and field excellence and, because of a lack of workload, this know-how might disappear;.
• Workload for the European design offices.

The best way to take up these challenges would be to launch a new Combat Aircraft Programme in Europe, based on an entirely European development. Unfortunately, if one looks at the need for replacing existing combat aircraft in Europe, it appears clearly that there will be no such opportunity before the horizon 2030 at the earliest.

Facing such a situation, the French Government has decided to take the initiative by launching a project of unmanned combat air vehicle technological demonstrator in European co-operation.

The aim of French initiative on the nEUROn Demonstrator is to provide European design offices with a project which will allow them to develop know-how and to maintain capabilities in the coming years. This project will be go beyond the theoretical studies that have been conducted until now in the European Union, as it plan the building and flight demonstration of an aircraft.