Royal Air Force

Safe and responsible innovation

Newcastle Innovations works with the Royal Air Force (RAF) to deliver complex, high‑trust innovation and engagement programmes.

Our partnership spans live military infrastructure, secure environments, and heritage, demonstrating how innovation and engagement can be delivered safely, responsibly and at scale within highly regulated defence settings.

Aiming for Net Zero

The RAF has committed to achieving Net Zero carbon emissions by 2040, a challenge that must be met without compromising operational readiness at home or overseas. Climate change itself is recognised as a growing security risk, influencing humanitarian crises, global stability and defence resilience.

Through Newcastle Innovations, the RAF partnered with Newcastle University to create the ViTAL Living Lab, a first‑of‑its‑kind innovation hub embedded within a live military base at RAF Leeming.

We spoke to Karen Allenby, Head of Innovation Partnerships, and Oliver Heidrich, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering to understand more about this decarbonisation innovation project.

Oliver: ‘When it comes to the military sector, trust is everything. It was vital that we built a fantastic team of academics and researchers who we knew would be aware of what is most important.

‘We developed a great working relationship with the RAF team, who ultimately felt they could trust us and the decisions we were making about the project. Our collaboration led to immediate responses from both sides and plenty of co-working innovation.’

Karen: ‘With an enquiry like the one Station Commander Crawford approached me with, you need a trusted network of people that you can rely upon. Trust is paramount.

‘The Newcastle Innovations team built the bridge between the RAF and University colleagues, creating a trusted network of people who were genuinely interested in the project and, vitally, had that all-important willingness to respond.

‘I knew that the team I had helped to create would get stuck in and deliver a coherent, intelligent, innovative strategy that would push the project forward.’

Oliver: ‘The project went through a rigorous shortlisting process to access funding via the Defence Innovation Fund, with 43 out of 90 total proposals selected for full application and only four out of six securing funding. Our project was part of this select group.’

The project design

The ViTAL Living Lab aimed to carry out experiments at the active RAF Leeming site to measure carbon reduction through the development and testing of innovative zero‑carbon interventions..

Oliver: ‘We delivered six distinct experiments, assisting in the efforts to achieve Net Zero. These experiments were:

Throughout the project, the team overcame significant challenges, showcasing the determination of our academic colleagues to deliver innovation with meaningful impact—both for our partner and beyond.

Karen: ‘There were, of course, certain restrictions that come with working on a Ministry of Defence (MOD) site, such as restricted access to certain areas.’

Oliver: ‘You cannot carry out some tasks without specialist approval, especially when it comes to accessing certain areas of land inside a base. But for each challenge, we would pivot our ideas and come up with a new way of continuing the project.

‘We were also dealing with Covid restrictions at the time, with around 4,000 people living and working on this active site. Plus, we encountered regular leadership turnover within the RAF, with the Commander changing every couple of years.

‘This meant we had to display a high level of persistence, as the RAF’s lead for the project changed.

‘Our Newcastle University team responded very well to this challenge, ensuring continuity of trust across this multi-year, multi-leadership project.

‘Despite the challenges, as a trusted innovation partner, we were given access to data and information that would otherwise be restricted, allowing us to be the first team in the world to provide a sustainability baseline for a military site.’

The wider impact

Several unexpected benefits have also emerged during the completion of this project, both for the RAF and the Newcastle University team.

Oliver: ‘I never expected our paper regarding our ViTAL project findings to be published in the prestigious Nature journal.

‘This means that our peer-reviewed research is now accessible to an international readership engaging with the field of natural sciences, which will hopefully lead to further strides in this area, inspiring more innovation.'

The paper called for action in four areas to decarbonise military activity:

1. militaries across the globe must be held accountable to common standards for accounting, reporting and reducing military emissions, and these must be transparent, time-bound and measurable
2. militaries must improve their capacity to calculate, manage and reduce emissions, and train personnel to do so
3. researchers need to document and understand how armed conflicts impact the climate and society
4. independent research is paramount to keep militaries accountable and to uphold obligations made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

Oliver: ‘We're seeing growing attention in the defence sector to the effects of climate change on security and the role for sustainable technology in military platforms.

‘With the wealth of papers and reports published from this project, our findings are likely to have reached a readership of over one million people, which is a fantastic achievement and brilliant for the spread of innovative knowledge.’

Karen: ‘It was also lovely to see human impact stories come out of this project, particularly in relation to one of our RAF contacts who went on to move into an innovation role within this industry.

‘He believes that working on this project gave him the confidence to realise that there was another route for him outside of the military, widening his career prospects.’

Oliver: ‘It was also wonderful to receive multiple awards for our research, including both the Innovation Award and the Sustainable Delivery Award at the MOD Sanctuary Awards.

‘Our project also appeared in the Sanctuary - the Ministry of Defence sustainability magazine produced by the Defence Infrastructure Organisation - as a special feature, which was very gratifying.’

Opening up the history of space tracking

RAF Fylingdales has played a vital part in our national security since 1963. Part of UK Space Command, the station provides a continuous ballistic missile early warning service to the UK and US Governments, ensuring a surprise missile attack cannot succeed.

The station's radar is capable of tracking objects including satellites and debris, 3000 miles into space.

But despite it's central role in national security, much of the work of the station is something of a mystery to the wider public.

Through the RAF Fylingdales project, we worked to make more than 50 years of unseen space technology visible to the public for the first time.

Situated on the North York Moors, the site is in the perfect location to watch and record the evolution of the Low Earth Orbit environment.

Many aspects of our everyday lives depend on technology in Low Earth Orbit, such as weather forecasting. RAF Fylingdales contributes to the global tracking of over 2,000 operational low-orbit satellites among a field of 20,000 pieces of space debris. They distinguish missile attacks from spacecraft and junk.