Stuart Anderson MP asked a dull question in July and got a dull answer in September. Buried in it is the clearest picture anyone has yet published of where Britain’s next fighter is actually being built — and a small arithmetic problem.

The Future Combat Air System supports over 4,500 jobs across the UK. Around 43 per cent of them are in the North West of England. Nineteen per cent are in the South West, sixteen per cent in the Midlands, eight per cent in Scotland. The remaining, said the minister, twenty-two per cent are split between other regions.

That adds up to 108 per cent.

The Answer Itself

The exchange is written question UIN 19077, tabled on 15 July 2026 and answered on 2 September. Anderson had asked, with reference to page 47 of the Defence Investment Plan, for a regional split of the 90 per cent of FCAS jobs supported outside London and the South East.

Two companion answers went out the same day. UIN 19075 confirmed the 4,500-plus figure and said that neither the re-skilling process nor the underlying detail is managed centrally. UIN 19076 said around 3,000 graduates and apprentices have been recruited by Team Tempest partners since 2022 — but again, that how many of them are still on the programme is not tracked centrally.

That is the honest reading of all three answers: the department knows roughly where the money lands and does not track the people.

What the North West Actually Means

Forty-three per cent in one region is not a rounding artefact. It is BAE Systems, and specifically two Lancashire sites twelve miles apart.

Samlesbury builds the fuselage sections and the serpentine intake ducts. Warton builds the wings and fins, takes on final assembly from the end of 2026, and is the flight-test base. Between them they are where the demonstrator aircraft physically exists.

The other percentages resolve just as neatly. The South West is Rolls-Royce at Filton and Bristol, running engine and intake integration testing. Scotland is Leonardo UK in Edinburgh, roughly two thousand people working on radar and sensing. The Midlands and the rest include MBDA at Stevenage, which owns the Weapon Effects Management System.

Note what is not in that list. Rolls-Royce Derby, Leonardo Basildon and MBDA Bolton are frequently named in coverage of this programme. None of them is confirmed by any source as doing GCAP work.

The RAF’s own explainer on what a sixth-generation aircraft is supposed to do.

The Programme Around the Jobs

GCAP launched on 9 December 2022, merging Britain’s Tempest with Japan’s F-X and bringing in Italy. The treaty establishing GIGO, the trinational government organisation, was signed in Tokyo on 14 December 2023 and ratified by all three parliaments through 2024. Its headquarters opened in Reading on 7 July 2025.

The industrial side is Edgewing, a joint venture launched on 20 June 2025 and split precisely in thirds between BAE Systems, Leonardo S.p.A. and the Mitsubishi-led JAIEC. It is the design authority, and it is also headquartered in Reading.

The money has moved fast. The first joint international contract, worth £686 million, went from the GCAP Agency to Edgewing on 2 April 2026. A £4.6 billion contract on 3 July took the programme into detailed design through to the end of 2027. A further £708 million UK national extension followed on 22 July, split between BAE Systems, Leonardo UK, MBDA UK and Rolls-Royce. The government says it has put more than £5 billion into FCAS since 2018, with £8.6 billion allocated for GCAP over the next four years.

The Aircraft Those Jobs Are Building

The Combat Air Flying Demonstrator is a crewed, supersonic, twin-engine aircraft with twin canted fins, no horizontal tails, a cropped delta wing and an internal weapons bay. It is the first UK-designed crewed combat aircraft in forty years — the last was the BAe EAP in 1986.

At Farnborough in July, BAE said roughly half the main structure was in final assembly, with 11,500 parts designed and released accounting for about 90 per cent of the aircraft’s weight. More than 300 hours have been flown on a bespoke hybrid ground and simulator rig by BAE, Rolls-Royce and RAF test pilots. It is powered by two Eurojet EJ200s donated from the Typhoon fleet, sitting behind long serpentine ducts, on landing gear derived from the Tornado.

The first flight date has quietly gone soft. The target had been before the end of 2027. In a written answer on 6 July 2026, Pollard declined to confirm that, saying only that the aircraft is expected to begin testing key capabilities by mid-2028 and that the timing of the first flight will be confirmed closer to the milestone.

Which is the same department, the same minister, and the same instinct on display as the 108 per cent: give a number where a number is unavoidable, and keep the ones that matter loose.

BAE Systems on the cockpit technologies being developed for the aircraft.

Leonardo on ISANKE, the integrated sensing and non-kinetic effects suite — the Edinburgh end of that eight per cent.

Sources: UK Parliament written questions UIN 19075, 19076 and 19077; GOV.UK; Royal Air Force; BAE Systems; Leonardo; Edgewing; UK Defence Journal; Aerospace Testing International; ADS Advance.