Canada Joins the Allied Training Revolution: ITPS’s M-346 Selection and the Spread of the IFTS Paradigm
On May 26, 2026, Leonardo announced that ITPS Canada had contracted for six M-346 T Block 20 advanced jet trainers with options for six more to expand allied tactical fighter pilot training at the International Tactical Training Centre (ITTC) in North Bay, Ontario. The aircraft are expected to enter service in 2029. The announcement was made at a signing ceremony at Venegono, Italy, where ITPS Executive Chairman Giorgio Clementi formalized the contract alongside Leonardo’s Aeronautics Division Managing Director Stefano Bortoli.
This is not simply a procurement story. It is a confirmation that the approach to advanced combat pilot training pioneered at Italy’s International Flight Training School (IFTS) at Decimomannu, Sardinia built around the M-346 Master and its integrated Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) eco system has now crossed the Atlantic to take root in North America. Canada, with its own deep tradition of pilot training excellence and its leading role in flight training through CAE, is not a naïve buyer of foreign concepts. When a country with that heritage and institutional depth selects this solution, it carries analytical weight. The IFTS paradigm is no longer a European experiment. It is becoming the allied standard for training the next generation of combat pilots.
What ITPS Canada Is and Why This Decision Matters
ITPS Canada is not a minor actor in the global pilot training enterprise. With more than twenty-five years of delivering advanced and specialist flight test and military tactical training, and having served over twenty-nine air arms to date, it operates from facilities in London and North Bay, Ontario. Its three divisions, the International Test Pilots School, the International Tactical Training Centre, and ITPS Engineering, give it a comprehensive profile spanning advanced training, lead-in fighter training, and aircraft sustainment. The ITTC currently serves pilots from more than ten different air forces globally.
The significance of North Bay as a base for this expanded capability is worth noting. It situates allied training within the broader NORAD and NATO context, embedding advanced tactical pilot preparation in Canada’s northern defense architecture. As allied air forces look to expand both capacity and interoperability with partners who fly the F-35 and the Eurofighter Typhoon, a Canadian hub capable of hosting pilots from multiple nations and training them together on shared platforms and shared procedures is not a marginal asset. It is strategically consequential.
ITPS CEO Dave Lohse conducted an airborne evaluation of the M-346 in October 2025 in airspace north of Ottawa. His assessment after that flight was unambiguous: the aircraft’s performance, digital flight control system, and advanced training architecture made it the right platform for the ITTC’s next phase of growth. He specifically framed it in terms of enabling pilots from Canada and partner nations to “train together in a modern and operationally focused environment.” That language matters. It reflects an understanding that the combat pilot training problem today is not primarily a bilateral or national one. It is a coalition readiness problem.
The IFTS Paradigm: What It Is and Why It Travels
To understand why this selection is significant, one needs to understand what the IFTS approach actually represents—not as a vendor solution, but as a doctrinal and operational framework.
As I have argued in considerable depth in my recent book Training for the High-End Fight: The Paradigm Shift for Combat Pilot Training, the shift underway in advanced pilot training is not about acquiring a newer aircraft. It is about moving from what can be called a “kill chain” model of training — linear, sequential, platform-focused — to a training architecture designed to produce operators capable of functioning within kill webs: distributed, networked, multi-domain environments where no single platform dominates and the ability to integrate, adapt, and decide under cognitive saturation is the decisive variable.
The M-346 was not designed to be a better version of what came before. It was designed from inception as the centerpiece of an integrated training ecosystem. Its Embedded Tactical Training System (ETTS) is not a retrofit or an add-on. It is core to the aircraft’s design philosophy. In standalone mode, the ETTS loads simulated data and complex threat scenarios before takeoff, enabling controlled training independent of external infrastructure. In network mode, it receives real-time data from ground monitoring stations, allowing instructors to inject threats, change scenario parameters mid-flight, and create dynamic, multi-domain, combat environments that are both tailorable to student skill / training level and adaptable to student performance in real time. The aircraft’s sensors respond to simulated threats as if they were physically present. Decision-making stress is real. Combat cognition is genuinely activated.
This is what former Italian Air Force Chief of Staff Lt. General (Retired) Pasquale Preziosa described in his foreword to that book as “combat cognition, safely weaponized for learning.” The key word is safely. The M-346 LVC approach is a proven method that enables air forces to replicate the cognitive and tactical complexity of high-end contested environments without the cost, logistics, and risk of assembling live strike packages or expending live weapons. The system can accommodate up to ten friendly and enemy aircraft interactions within a single operational scenario. Pilots in full-mission CAE simulators on the ground can fly alongside—and against—pilots in actual M-346s airborne, all operating within the same contested scenario, all seeing the same tactical picture on their Helmet Mounted Displays.
This is not simulation as a substitute for flying. It is simulation as an amplifier of operational fidelity, embedded into every phase of the training cycle. It also offers the inherent advantage of a simulated environment to faithfully replicate challenges or systems that may be risky or impractically to engage in live training environments.
The coalition dimension is equally important. As Preziosa observed, the effect of training thirteen or more nations through the same ecosystem is that coalition airpower is “no longer something you improvise at the start of a crisis. It is something you build into the nervous system of your aviators from the first day of advanced training. Shared procedures become shared instincts. Shared instincts become shared deterrence.” Because this system has been fielded and evolving for a decade now, it not only brings the advantages of training with a coalition mindset, it brings refinement from instructors who have actually operated in the most advanced aircraft within a coalition environment. Continual improvement and refinement has led not only to a proven, low risk solution to advanced training but to the most effective solution.
That is the M-346-centerd IFTS paradigm. And it is precisely what Canada is now choosing to replicate at North Bay.
Canada’s Heritage, CAE, and the Low-Risk Logic of This Selection
Canada’s selection carries additional weight because of CAE’s central role in the M-346 training ecosystem. CAE, headquartered in Montreal, is one of the world’s premier civil and military simulation and training technology companies. It is not an outside participant in the IFTS model. CAE’s advanced ground-based simulators are integral to the M-346’s LVC architecture—they are the virtual component of the Live-Virtual-Constructive triad that makes the system coherent. CAE simulators mirror the M-346’s cockpit environment with full-mission fidelity, and they are networked directly into the same scenarios that airborne aircraft are flying.
For Canada to bring the M-346 Block 20 to North Bay through ITPS is thus, in a meaningful sense, an extension of the partnership that already exists between Leonardo and CAE within the IFTS ecosystem. Canada is not acquiring an alien technology and starting from scratch. It is importing and building upon an architecture in which a major Canadian industrial partner is already deeply embedded. The industrial logic reinforces the operational logic. The risk profile of this acquisition, for a nation with Canada’s existing industrial relationships and training expertise, is distinctly low.
The Block 20 is the next evolution of an already operationally proven platform. The M-346 family has now accumulated over 160,000 flight hours with more than 160 aircraft sold to operators across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Among those operators are air forces training pilots for the F-35, the Eurofighter Typhoon, and next-generation combat air systems. The Block 20 adds augmented reality cockpit systems and large-area touchscreen displays, further advancing the fidelity with which trainees are prepared for the human-machine interfaces of the most advanced fighters now entering service. It includes AI-enabled adaptive coaching that analyzes individual pilot performance data continuously, personalizing learning paths and identifying cognitive breakdown points before they become operational failures.
The United States Air Force’s use of the M-346 and IFTS to train student pilots destined for 4th and 5th generation fighter assignments following their IFTS training has already established the aircraft and training system credibility within the US military flight training context. Canada joining this framework is a natural evolution, not a departure.
What Twenty Countries Have Learned and What Canada Now Inherits
The M-346 is not an untested proposition. Twenty countries operating 4th and 5th generation fighters now train their pilots on it or have selected it, across both the advanced trainer and multirole light fighter versions. The Italian Air Force has designated it as the future aircraft for the Frecce Tricolori national aerobatic team—a choice that reflects confidence in the platform’s agility and reliability well beyond training roles. Air forces in Singapore, Israel, Poland, Qatar, and Greece have all validated the operational concept in their own institutional contexts.
What these operators have collectively demonstrated is that the IFTS paradigm scales and evolves to meet national needs. It adapts to different national training philosophies, different threat environments, and different downstream platforms. The architecture does not require every operator to build an identical replica of Decimomannu. It requires commitment to the LVC integration philosophy, to the principle that training and operational readiness exist on a continuum, and to the institutional feedback loops that allow front-line operational experience to drive continuous syllabus evolution.
At IFTS itself, as Preziosa noted, curricula can be updated in weeks rather than years, driven by what front-line F-35 and Eurofighter units are actually encountering at the operational edge. Furthermore, the entire IFTS consisting of its individual components and the ecosystem surrounding them, have evolved and been improved and refined by instructors coming from those same units. Students routinely see multiple major syllabus improvements based on real-world operational feedback within a single nine-month training cycle. This is what genuine training agility looks like, and it stands in sharp contrast to legacy approaches where training doctrine lagged operational reality by years.
For Canada, inheriting this lineage means that the ITTC at North Bay is not acquiring a static capability. It is joining a living ecosystem that improves continuously and that is architecturally connected through shared platform standards, LVC protocols, and coalition training relationships to the broader allied training enterprise already operating across Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.
The Strategic Dimension: Training as Sovereignty Infrastructure
There is a dimension to this selection that deserves explicit treatment, even if it sits beyond the immediate procurement announcement. Training is not a support function for air power. It is increasingly a form of sovereignty infrastructure.
As the complexity of the high-end fight has grown, driven by contested electronic environments, distributed kill web architectures, manned-unmanned teaming, and the cognitive demands of operating fifth-generation platforms in multi-domain engagements, the quality of a nation’s training pipeline has become a first-order strategic variable. A state that cannot generate pilots capable of operating at the speed and cognitive complexity of modern contested airspace cannot leverage its platform investment, regardless of what it flies. Conversely, a state that builds genuine training depth and operational integration into its pilot development pipeline is generating deterrence value at every stage, not just when forces are deployed.
Canada’s decision to expand the ITTC with the M-346 Block 20 is a decision to invest in that sovereignty. North Bay will train pilots from more than ten allied air forces. It will do so using an architecture that builds coalition interoperability from the earliest stages of advanced training. It will operate within Canada’s existing relationships with NATO, NORAD, and the broader Five Eyes defense community. And it will do so using a platform and training system that Canada’s own defense industrial base—through CAE—helped shape.
The geopolitical timing is not incidental. Allied air forces are under pressure to expand training capacity, manage the growing complexity of fifth-generation transition pipelines, and do so in an environment of constrained defense budgets and competing modernization priorities. The IFTS model with its demonstrated ability to increase training throughput, reduce live flying costs, and prepare pilots for high-end fights rather than merely certifying their basic flying competency offers exactly the combination of capability and cost-effectiveness that this environment demands.
Conclusion: A North American Node in a Global Allied Training Architecture
What ITPS Canada has done is not simply purchase an aircraft. It has made a strategic commitment to a training paradigm—one that has been validated operationally across twenty nations, refined continuously at IFTS over more than a decade, and now embedded within a network that stretches from Sardinia to Singapore, from Warsaw to North Bay.
The M-346 T Block 20 aircraft scheduled to arrive at the ITTC starting in 2029 will represent more than a fleet upgrade. They will represent Canada’s formal entry into an allied training ecosystem whose core argument that the future of air combat is won or lost in training as much as in the engagement envelope is becoming the consensus view of the most capable air forces on the planet.
Canada, with its own illustrious training heritage and its deep industrial partnership with CAE, is not a late adopter. It is a natural node in an architecture that was always going to expand. The question was when, not whether.
The answer is now.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Leonardo S.p.A. “ITPS Canada Orders Leonardo M-346 T Block 20 Advanced Jet Trainers to Meet Evolving Tactical Training Requirements.” Press release, May 26, 2026. https://www.leonardo.com/en/press-release-detail/-/detail/26-05-2026-itps-canada-orders-leonardo-m-346-t-block-20-advanced-jet-trainers-to-meet-evolving-tactical-training-requirements.
Laird, Robbin F. Training for the High-End Fight: The Paradigm Shift for Combat Pilot Training. Arlington, VA: Second Line of Defense, 2025.
M-346 Platform and Program
Defence Industry Europe. “Leonardo Unveils Next-Generation M-346 Block 20 Cockpit for Advanced Training and Combat Roles.” Accessed May 2026. https://defence-industry.eu/leonardo-unveils-next-generation-m-346-block-20-cockpit-for-advanced-training-and-combat-roles/.
Defense.info. “The Leonardo M-346: Evolution of a Modern Military Trainer.” Accessed May 2026. https://defense.info/defense-systems/the-leonardo-m-346-evolution-of-a-modern-military-trainer/.
Leonardo S.p.A. “M-346 Aircraft.” Accessed May 2026. https://aircraft.leonardo.com/en/products/m-346.
The Aviationist. “An In-Depth Look at the International Flight Training School.” December 6, 2022. https://theaviationist.com/2022/12/06/ifts-deep-dive/.
The Aviationist. “Leonardo M-346: 20 Years of Advanced Jet Training.” August 8, 2024. https://theaviationist.com/2024/08/08/leonardo-m-346-20-years/.
The War Zone. “Blending Live Enemies with Virtual Ones Is Transforming the Way Fighter Pilots Train.” Accessed May 2026. https://www.twz.com/blending-live-enemies-with-virtual-ones-is-transforming-the-way-fighter-pilots-train.
LVC Architecture and Integrated Training
AIN Online. “Italian Jet Trainer Finds New Cost-Saving Roles.” February 13, 2016. https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2016-02-13/italian-jet-trainer-finds-new-cost-saving-roles.
Military Aerospace Electronics. “Leonardo DRS, Honeywell, CAE Technologies Deliver Embedded Training Simulation Onboard Aircraft.” Accessed May 2026. https://www.militaryaerospace.com/commercial-aerospace/article/14229523/leonardo-drs-honeywell-cae-technologies-deliver-embedded-training-simulation-onboard-aircraft.
Patria Group. “Live, Virtual, Constructive: Cost-Effective and Better Training.” Accessed May 2026. https://www.patriagroup.com/newsroom/patria-magazine/tech/live-virtual-constructive-cost-effective-and-better-training.
Thales Group. “LVC: A Resource-Efficient Solution for High-Intensity Combat Training.” Accessed May 2026. https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/market-specific/training-simulation/news/lvc-resource-efficient-solution-high-intensity-combat.
U.S. Naval Institute. “Use Live, Virtual, and Constructive Training to Meet the High-End Fight.” Proceedings, January 2024. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/january/use-live-virtual-constructive-training-meet-high-end-fight.
Italian Airpower and IFTS Context
Leonardo S.p.A. “First Steps for the International Flight Training School.” Accessed May 2026. https://www.leonardo.com/en/news-and-stories-detail/-/detail/first-steps-for-the-international-flight-training-school-2.
The Aviationist. “Italy Sets to Establish First F-35 Training Center Outside the U.S.” September 12, 2025. https://theaviationist.com/2025/09/12/trapani-f-35/.
U.S. Air Force Pilot Training Context
Defense News. “US Air Force Revamps Pilot Training as T-7 Era Nears.” October 1, 2025. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2025/10/01/us-air-force-revamps-pilot-training-as-t-7-era-nears/.
Kill Web and Fifth-Generation Operational Context
Laird, Robbin. “The Fifth-Generation Experience: Getting On with Combat Transformation.” Second Line of Defense, April 2015. https://sldinfo.com/2015/04/the-fifth-generation-experience-getting-on-with-combat-transformation/.
Laird, Robbin. “Air Combat Operations 2025 and Beyond: The Williams Foundation Seminar.” Second Line of Defense, May 2014. https://sldinfo.com/2014/05/air-combat-operations-2025-and-beyond-the-williams-foundation-seminar/.
Defense.info. “VADM Cheever on the Evolving Carrier Air Wing.” https://defense.info/interview-of-the-week/vadm-cheever-on-the-evolving-carrier-air-wing/