>>539239037
Yeah It would be the symptom of a bigger illness that has already spread through and damaged Europe, by constantly buy american equipment we slowly lost our manufacturing capabilities. Smaller countries of course have to buy, but the UK should be able to at the very least develop and built a trainer.
The biggest issue is your politicians stalled too much, you should've started development 10 years ago. Second issue is the trainer market is become saturated. M-346, T-7, L-159, T-50, Hurjet, TX etc.
Back in the day the UK alone would've bought enough trainers from an UK company like BAE to justify the development cost, so foreign sales were a bonus. Now the UK,from what I heard, no matter what trainer they choose they might be looking at 30 airframes max. Without guaranteed sales on the foreign markets you're looking at a big risk. Hence why Aeralis offered to partner up with Dassault to jointly develop it, as dangeroud a partnership with Dassault is.

At least on more serious matter the GCAP is surprisingly going smootly. The JV was formed, the consortium for the engines and electronics as well (engines; RR, IHI, AA / avionics: Leonardo UK, Elettronica, Mitsubishi) and the UK is already building the pre-demonstrator for a scheduled first flight in 2027.
Returning to the M-346 the best of both worlds would be to buy/loan some M-346FA armed with APKWS II for antidrone operations and let Aeralis have more time to develop their products, even if it ends up not making money so that the UK can retain critical design capabilities.