The M-346 at Farnborough 2026: The Block 20 Story Continues
When I wrote Training for the High-End Fight, I gave Leonardo’s Block 20 program for the M-346 its own chapter, because it seemed to me the clearest example on offer of a training system deliberately built to evolve rather than to freeze in place.
The Farnborough International Airshow, held near London from 20 to 24 July 2026, gave that argument a real-world test. Leonardo arrived with a portfolio it described as spanning “air, land, sea, space and cyber,” but it was the M-346 advanced jet trainer and light fighter family that produced the week’s most concrete results: a firm contract for a dozen M-346F Block 20 aircraft with Indonesia, an expanded training-systems partnership with Canada’s CAE, an active pursuit of a British jet-trainer requirement, and a manned-unmanned teaming demonstration in which an M-346 flew as the “quarterback” for a Turkish-built combat drone.
Taken together, the week reads less like a single company’s trade-show news cycle and more like a status update on the paradigm shift I described in the book.
A Farnborough 2026 Update
The chapter I wrote on Block 20 drew on conversations with Leonardo executives at the International Flight Training School (IFTS) in Decimomannu, Sardinia, where Stefano Centioni, the school’s Chief of Flight Training, offered an analogy I have not stopped thinking about: Leonardo does not want to become the Motorola of pilot training, a market leader that stood still while a competitor redefined the category. Giuseppe Recchia, Senior Vice President and Head of IFTS Business at Leonardo Aeronautics, made a related point when I spoke with him: this forward momentum is embedded in the company’s DNA, expressed through what Italians call “sistema paese,” a country system in which institution and industry collaborate as equals in developing the original system.
That collaboration continues after fielding, as real-world training results and ongoing interaction with the training community shape the system’s further evolution. It is not simply an airplane’s evolution but a key element in the ongoing evolution of the training ecosystem.
Leonardo did not present the M-346 as a stand-alone airplane, and this matters because it is exactly the framing the book argues is now essential across the training enterprise. The aircraft is the flying element of an Integrated Training System that also comprises ground-based simulators, Live-Virtual-Constructive synthetic environments, and, increasingly, a node in experiments on crewed-uncrewed teaming. That is the same architecture I walked through in the LVC chapters of the book, built around the idea that training has to be understood as a system rather than a platform. Farnborough 2026 was Leonardo restating that argument to a global audience, with contracts attached.
The book described Block 20 largely as an argument and a design philosophy: augmented-reality helmet displays, biometric monitoring feeding adaptive training algorithms, an Embedded Tactical Training System capable of simulating sensors and weapons that are not physically on the aircraft, and a training architecture built to accommodate adjunct autonomous systems before sixth-generation aircraft even reach service. Farnborough 2026 is where that architecture starts showing up in signed paperwork rather than briefing slides.
The upgrade package itself, first disclosed in 2024 and now entering export contracts, replaces the aircraft’s six multi-function displays with two Large Area Displays, one per cockpit, and adds a low-profile head-up display, a new digital video and data recorder, and the augmented-reality helmet-mounted display that the book’s Block 20 chapter described in some detail.
Leonardo executives have consistently characterized the upgrade as deliberately low-risk, since it touches none of the airframe, engines, or safety-critical systems, which means it supports both new-build production and retrofit of the existing fleet. For the armed F-variant, Block 20 adds an AESA radar, Leonardo’s Grifo-E, a Link 16 tactical datalink, a weapon system interface unit, an integrated Defensive Aid Sub-System, and two additional wingtip missile rails that bring total hardpoints to seven, supporting more than 2,000 kilograms of ordnance across air-to-air, air-to-ground, close air support, combat search-and-rescue, and tactical reconnaissance roles. Jane’s has noted that the F Block 20’s radar and datalink set it clearly apart from earlier M-346 variants still in service, and that the standard is now spreading from its initial European and North American footprint into Asia.
That spread is exactly what happened on 21 July, when Leonardo, Indonesian partner PT ESystem Solutions, and Indonesia’s Ministry of Defence signed a firm contract for twelve M-346F Block 20 aircraft, following a Letter of Intent from February 2026. The deal, whose value was not disclosed, makes Indonesia the twenty-third air force — the U.S. among them — to operate the M-346 or train on the system at the IFTS, and the first in Southeast Asia to take delivery of the Block 20 standard, with deliveries beginning in 2030 and a package that includes localized maintenance, repair and overhaul capability, training, and workforce development.
Lorenzo Mariani, Leonardo’s newly appointed CEO, called it evidence of “the country’s continued and yet growing trust in our capabilities across domains.” Defense News had reported back in February that the M-346 was selected to replace Indonesia’s aging BAE Systems Hawk fleet, which entered service in 1996, a displacement of the British-built Hawk that runs through several of Leonardo’s other 2026 pursuits as well.
The following day, CAE and Leonardo announced an expanded collaboration building on their long-running partnership on the M-346’s Integrated Training System, extending the proven relationship into Live-Virtual-Constructive and Live Synthetic Integration environments and committing both companies to a joint technology roadmap covering Block 20 features, AI-enabled systems, and increasingly autonomous mission environments. Both companies pointed to IFTS at Decimomannu, the same school where I did much of the reporting for the book, and where the CAE relationship is already operational, as the proof of concept for where this is headed.
The Baykar news is, to my mind, the most forward-looking piece of the week, and, in addition to showing the adaptability of the M-346, goes directly to the adjunct-autonomy argument in the Block 20 chapter. Leonardo’s joint venture with the Turkish manufacturer, LBA Systems, reached full operational readiness during the show. Engineers and pilots briefed journalists on flight trials conducted in May 2026 at Baykar’s Çorlu facility in Türkiye, in which an M-346 assumed airborne control of a Bayraktar Kızılelma uncrewed fighter, commanding position changes, separations, and rejoins that the drone executed autonomously using a newly developed avionics and computing suite, its data links protected by Leonardo’s own cyber-defense system.
A second Italian Air Force T-346A flew as chase aircraft. This is manned-unmanned teaming moving from the training-system concept I described in the book into an actual flight-test program, using the same crewed aircraft that trains the pilots who will eventually fly with or command systems like it operationally.
Separately, in the same press cycle, Mariani said Leonardo would seek a British industrial partner to support a planned M-346 bid for an emerging UK jet-trainer competition intended to replace the Royal Air Force’s Hawk T1 and T2 aircraft, the latter also flown by the Red Arrows. “We need a British partner,” he said, adding that “the only way to do it is not to behave as a pure exporter”, a nod to the UK government’s Defense Investment Plan and its emphasis on sustaining domestic industrial employment through acquisition programs.
There’s a coalition-building dimension to all of this that the book treated as one of the more underappreciated benefits of an advanced training system like Block 20, and Farnborough 2026 reinforced it again. IFTS already trains student pilots from more than a dozen international air forces, several of which operate 5th generation fighters, and that multinational mix creates a training environment where pilots from different countries learn to operate together from the earliest stages of their careers, rather than meeting each other for the first time in a coalition squadron years later.
The Indonesian deal, the CAE expansion, and the UK pursuit are all, in their own way, extensions of that same logic: each new customer or partner is less a standalone sale than another node added to a training ecosystem that Leonardo has spent two decades building, and that the book argues is becoming as strategically important as any single weapons platform.
Industry Reception
What struck me reading the trade coverage after the show was how little of it treated the M-346 as an unproven contender anymore. That’s a change from the program’s earlier years, and it’s consistent with the argument I made in the book that Leonardo’s training enterprise has moved past the stage of building credibility toward the stage of being a reference point for others.
Jane’s described the Indonesian contract simply as securing a Southeast Asian foothold for the Block 20 standard.
Aviation Week‘s coverage of the UK pursuit was more cautious, noting that Leonardo faces a genuinely crowded field, a Boeing-BAE Systems-Saab T-7 team, Lockheed Martin and Korea Aerospace Industries with the T-50, Sierra Nevada’s Freedom trainer, and Turkish Aerospace Industries’ Hurjet. It suggested that Leonardo’s existing UK industrial footprint of nearly 10,000 employees may matter as much as the airframe’s specifications.
The Polish outlet MILMAG placed the CAE agreement against the M-346’s operational record: more than 170,000 accumulated flight hours, over 170 aircraft ordered, and selection as the trainer of choice by 23 Air Forces.
The Aviationist surfaced Mariani’s unscripted remarks about possible cooperation with Ukraine’s drone industry, modeled explicitly on the Baykar relationship, which suggests observers at the show read the Kızılelma teaming trials as a template Leonardo intends to repeat elsewhere.
The throughline across all of that coverage is one I recognize from writing the book: analysts increasingly see the M-346 less as a trainer competing on price and performance and more as an integration platform, valuable precisely because it can absorb new sensors, weapons, and now autonomous-teaming roles without a wholly new airframe program. Leonardo’s own people describe this as a deliberate strategy of continuous enhancement, and Farnborough 2026 is the clearest evidence yet that the strategy is working commercially as well as technically.
This ability to bring on new capabilities also shows the benefit of the ITS as an operationally proven system of systems well past its early development phase.
What this Confirms
None of this changes the central claim of Training for the High-End Fight, which is that the training enterprise itself not just the aircraft in it is where the real paradigm shift is happening. Block 20 was never just a cockpit upgrade. It was Leonardo’s answer to the question of how you train pilots for a fifth- and sixth-generation fight using an airframe conceived two decades ago, and the answer was to make the training system itself software-defined, data-driven, and open to autonomous adjuncts.
Farnborough 2026 shows that answer moving from the IFTS ramp in Sardinia into export contracts, coalition training partnerships, and live flight trials with combat drones on three continents at once. Indonesia’s order launches the Block 20 standard in Southeast Asia and pushes the M-346’s trainee count to twenty-three nations and climbing. The CAE agreement deepens the LVC architecture the book spent an entire section describing. The Baykar trials put manned-unmanned teaming into the air rather than the simulator.
And the UK campaign, whatever its outcome, is a reminder that the competition to define how the next generation of pilots gets trained is now genuinely global, fought as much on industrial-partnership terms as on airframe specifications.
I did not expect, when I finished the manuscript, to be writing a follow-up quite this soon, but that is rather the point of the argument the book makes: a proven training system built to evolve continuously will keep generating news, because it is designed to. Block 20 was never meant to be a finished product unveiled once and then defended. It was purposely built as, “future proof,” a platform that absorbs the next sensor, the next datalink, the next autonomous adjunct, and the next coalition partner without requiring a new airframe program each time.
Farnborough 2026 is one more data point confirming that the design philosophy is working as intended. What this week in England demonstrated rather clearly, is that a versatile, proven training system has, through Block 20, turned into one of the more interesting test cases anywhere in military aviation for how constant evolution on a validated, versatile and flexible platform can lead the way into the future of training for the high-end fight.
Bibliography
Anadolu Ajansı. “Italian Firm Leonardo, Türkiye’s Baykar Reveal Details of 1st Historic Drones, Fighter Jets Trials.” July 20, 2026. https://aa.com.tr/en/science-technology/italian-firm-leonardo-turkiyes-baykar-reveal-details-of-1st-historic-drones-fighter-jets-trials/4004067.
CAE Inc. and Leonardo S.p.A. “CAE and Leonardo Expand Collaboration to Advance M-346 Training and Develop Next-Generation Integrated Training Capabilities.” Joint press release, July 22, 2026. https://www.leonardo.com/en/press-release-detail/-/detail/22-07-2026-cae-and-leonardo-expand-collaboration-to-advance-m-346-training-and-develop-next-generation-integrated-training-capabilities.
“CAE and Leonardo Expand Collaboration to Advance M-346 Training.” SP’s Aviation, July 23, 2026. https://www.sps-aviation.com/news/?id=424&catId=42&h=CAE-and-Leonardo-expand-collaboration-to-advance-M346-training-and-develop-next-generation-integrated-training-capabilities.
“CAE and Leonardo Expand Cooperation on the M-346 Master.” MILMAG, July 24, 2026. https://milmag.pl/en/cae-and-leonardo-expand-cooperation-on-the-m-346-master/.
D’Urso, Stefano, and David Cenciotti. “Leonardo Secures Indonesian M-346F Deal, Advances AW149 Talks and Eyes Ukrainian Drone Cooperation.” The Aviationist, July 21, 2026. https://theaviationist.com/2026/07/21/leonardo-indonesia-m-346f-aw149/.
“Farnborough 2026: Leonardo Secures Indonesian M-346 Contract.” Jane’s, July 22, 2026. https://www.janes.com/defence-intelligence-insights/defence-news/defence/farnborough-2026-leonardo-secures-indonesian-m-346-contract.
Hudson, Lee. “Leonardo’s M-346 To Get Wide-Area Display, AESA Radar.” Aviation Week Network, July 22, 2024. https://aviationweek.com/shownews/farnborough-airshow/leonardos-m-346-get-wide-area-display-aesa-radar.
Kington, Tom. “Indonesia Selects Italian M-346 Trainer Jet.” Defense News, February 5, 2026. https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2026/02/05/indonesia-selects-italian-m-346-trainer-jet/.
“Leonardo M346.” Decimomannu Air Base. Accessed July 27, 2026. https://www.decimomannuairbase.com/leonardo-m346.html.
Leonardo S.p.A. “Block 20, the New Digital Face of the M-346.” Focus page. Accessed July 27, 2026. https://www.leonardo.com/en/focus-detail/-/detail/m-346-block-20.
———. “Leonardo and Baykar’s LBA Systems JV Achieves Full Operational Readiness.” Press release, July 21, 2026.
———. “Leonardo and Wojskowe Zakłady Lotnicze Nr 1 S.A. (WZL1) Contract for Long-Term Support of Polish M-346 ‘Bielik’ Fleet.” Press release, February 17, 2023. https://www.leonardo.com/en/press-release-detail/-/detail/17-02-2023-leonardo-and-wojskowe-zakłady-lotnicze-no-1-sa-wzl1-contract-for-long-term-support-of-polish-m-346-bielik-fleet.
———. “Leonardo at the Farnborough International Airshow 2026: Multi-Domain Integration, Industrial Partnerships and Global Security.” Press release, July 20, 2026. https://www.leonardo.com/en/press-release-detail/-/detail/20-07-2026-leonardo-at-the-farnborough-international-airshow-2026-multi-domain-integration-industrial-partnerships-and-global-security.
———. “Leonardo, PT ESystem Solutions and the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Indonesia Sign M-346 F Aircraft Procurement Contract to Meet Indonesian Air Force Training and Combat Requirements.” Press release, July 21, 2026. https://www.leonardo.com/en/press-release-detail/-/detail/21-07-2026-leonardo-pt-esystem-solutions-and-the-ministry-of-defence-of-the-republic-of-indonesia-sign-m-346-f-aircraft-procurement-contract-to-meet-indonesian-air-force-training-and-combat-requirements.
———. “Leonardo’s M-346 Fighter Attack Embarks on Maiden Flight Equipped with Grifo Radar.” Press release, July 23, 2020. https://www.leonardo.com/en/press-release-detail/-/detail/23-07-2020-leonardo-s-m-346-fighter-attack-embarks-on-maiden-flight-equipped-with-grifo-radar.
Wall, Robert. “Leonardo CEO Seeks British Partners To Support UK M-346 Bid.” Aviation Week Network, July 23, 2026. https://aviationweek.com/defense/aircraft-propulsion/leonardo-ceo-seeks-british-partners-support-uk-m-346-bid.
Training Combat Pilots for the Kill Web Era: A Strategic Evolution