Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, with reference to the oral evidence given to the Defence Select Committee on Tuesday 17 October 2017, on F35 procurement, HC326, if he will place in the Library details of the Babel Fish III project.
Answer
The specific results of the trial are classified. However, I can set out the overarching aims.
Trial Babel Fish III was a communications interoperability trial of an Airborne Gateway. The trial took place in 2016 involving Typhoon aircraft of 41(R) Test & Evaluation Squadron, and F-35 Lightning aircraft of 17(R) Test & Evaluation Squadron.
The trial aimed to demonstrate that the Multifunction Advanced Datalink (MADL) datalink used by the 5th Generation F-35 Lightning could communicate with the Link-16 datalink used by the 4th Generation Typhoon. The trial used an airborne communications gateway that is capable of translating the 5th generation messages into the appropriate format so they can be received by a 4th generation platform. This was the first time that this had been tested between our 5th and 4th generation aircraft.