RAF reveals ‘information node' plan for Voyager tanker-transport aircraft

The UK Royal Air Force (RAF) plans to trial the use of an Airbus Voyager tanker-transport aircraft as an airborne information node for multidomain operations.

Speaking at the ‘virtual’ Air & Space Power Association conference, a senior officer noted that the experiment is part of a wider drive to develop a ‘next-generation air force’ under Project ‘Astra’.

“In the next few months we will launch Babel Fish VII, looking to put Deckard, Nexus, and Raven onto a Voyager tanker – experimenting with multidomain integration to understand which areas we wish to further develop the full capability,” said Air Vice-Marshal Lincoln Taylor, Chief of Staff Capability, HQ Air Command.

Babel Fish is a series of tests in which different airborne systems are inter-connected and able to communicate. The Babel Fish events to date have dealt with sharing information between the ‘fourth-generation’ Eurofighter Typhoon and the ‘fifth-generation’ Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II combat aircraft. Deckard is a ‘cloud’-based app, Nexus is a data platform, while Raven is a micro digitalised server.

“The real turning point [in developing this next-generation information sharing capability] was the formation of the RAF Rapid Capabilities Office [RCO] RCO Air Information Experimentation [AIX] programme in 2019.