On October 9, the Italian operational headquarters of Edgewing was inaugurated in Turin, at Leonardo’s Corso Francia facility. Edgewing is the equal-share Joint Venture between BAE Systems, Leonardo, and Japan Aircraft Industrial Enhancement Co. Ltd. (JAIEC) responsible for the Global Combat Air Program (GCAP).

During the event, Leonardo CEO Lorenzo Mariani stated that 3 production lines are planned for the GCAP program: the Italian one will be located at Caselle. However, no official confirmation has been issued yet. Turin is the first of 3 “global sites” to open since Edgewing’s establishment. The other 2, at Warton in the United Kingdom and Nagoya in Japan, will open in the coming months and in about 1 year, respectively. Each site will host joint teams composed of personnel from the 3 partner nations’ companies, focused on engineering activities. The corporate and administrative headquarters is located in Reading, roughly 60 kilometers west of London, where the program’s governmental body, the GCAP International Government Organisation (GIGO), is also based — keeping the industrial and governmental interfaces in the same location.

At Corso Francia, Edgewing will operate across 3 buildings, including the one where this morning’s inauguration took place: 2 are already active, while the 3rd is under construction. By 2029, the site is expected to host around 1,000 people and become a full-fledged engineering hub, equipped with a common working environment enabling information exchange at multiple classification levels and shared remote design with the other sites.

On the contractual front, in April GIGO awarded Edgewing the program’s first international contract, worth £686 million, to fund the fighter’s key design and engineering activities — a step that brought into a fully international framework the work previously carried out through the 3 nations’ separate national contracts. In early July, a second international contract followed, worth £4.6 billion (approximately €5.3 billion) over 18 months, covering the completion of the advanced Concept & Assessment phase and the transition into detailed design and joint development of the aircraft.

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