Review of the Year 2023

Added: 3rd January 2024 by Leonardo

Here we look back over the past 12 months, linking to each month's highlights and achievements.

Make UK Manufacturing Award national finals, two of our colleagues took home top prizes
It was announced that Leonardo had been included in the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index
Leonardo’s STEM ambassadors in Yeovil organised a ‘Bright Sparks’ event
Clive Higgins assumed the role as our new Chair and CEO

Announcing our membership of Social Value UK
On Time To Talk Day, we shared a piece from Leonardo colleague Tom Fox
We hosted our first ever Springboard Conference
National Apprenticeship Week
We announced the location of our eighth UK site
The development of an Air Launched Effects (ALE) capability
Leonardo and BAE Systems announced that they would be offering an end-to-end InfraRed aircraft self-protection system to the international market

Taking part in DSEI Japan
We were delighted to welcome a NASA delegation to our Southampton site
Scottish Apprenticeship Week
To celebrate International Women’s Day, we were pleased to partner with the RAF and host Air Vice-Marshal Suraya Marshall

the first ECRS (European Common Radar System) Mk2 radar for the UK Typhoon fleet was delivered to BAE Systems
The 80th anniversary of our Edinburgh site in 2023
The Ministry of Defence announced that it had awarded a contract extension worth £656 million to progress the concepting and technology of the UK’s future combat air capability (FCAS)
To celebrate World Pilots Day at the end of the month, we began our ‘Meet The Pilots’ series of videos

our successful move to the secure cloud, as Leonardo became the first major defence company in the UK to do so
a 9-a-side football tournament at the LNER Stadium
on the 80th anniversary of the Dambusters Raid, Leonardo engineer, Simon Shackell, co-piloted a commemorative 620 nautical mile flight around the UK
The third annual AeroWomen event took place

Armed Forces Week returned in June, and we were proud to mark the occasion by re-signing the Armed Forces Covenant
we were delighted to welcome Chief of the General Staff (CGS), General Sir Patrick Sanders, to our Luton site
Leonardo Training Co-ordinator and RAF veteran, Yvonne Sykes, spoke about her experience taking on the infamous 54-mile Cateran Yomp
Later in the month, our Rampaging Chariots team was gearing up for the return of their rowdy robots

Leonardo supported the Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT)
We were proud to sign up to the Defence Aviation Net Zero Strategy at RIAT
We joined our partners, the Purpose Coalition, to welcome MPs to a parliamentary reception to show solidarity with Ukraine
We announced a new research partnership with the National Innovation Centre for Data, hosted by Newcastle University

In August, we held a commemorative event to celebrate Yeovil, home to Britain’s only onshore helicopter manufacturer, becoming officially recognised by the town and local councils as the ‘Home of British Helicopters’
To coincide with the event, we also published figures for our helicopter business’ supply chain purchases
As a summer of airshows came to a close at Bournemouth Air Fest, we thanked Flt Lt Matt Brighty and the RAF Typhoon Display Team for bringing us so much joy throughout
August saw the end of South Asian Heritage Month, which we celebrated at Leonardo for the first time in 2023 with events hosted across our UK sites

We were pleased to return to DSEI at ExCel London in September, to showcase our world-class portfolio to visitors from across the globe
We made many other significant announcements at DSEI, including that we had won a competition to provide expertise in data science, data engineering and data visualisation to the UK Ministry of Defence as part of its Cyber Mission Data programme
We supported National Inclusion Week once again in 2023
The Leonardo Challenge returned in September, with a new twist focussed on sustainability. Dubbed Move Together for the Planet, this year’s challenge saw colleagues from around the world joining either virtually or in-person to travel as far as they could by any physical means

We were delighted to launch our eighth UK site in October, as we officially opened our latest facility in Newcastle
At the start of the month, three of our senior leaders spoke about why they were taking part in a reverse mentoring programme in partnership with the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers (AFBE-UK)
At the end of the month, Leonardo apprentice Jainna Bhalla, Vice Chair of the Ethnicity Inclusion network group, won the Judge’s Choice category at the Multicultural Apprenticeship Awards
We celebrated 75 years of rotary wing flight at our site in Yeovil, the Home of British Helicopters

In November, we welcomed the last of our 2023 cohort of new Early Careers joiners to the company
Several Leonardo ambassadors attended the Wings Over Wairapara airshow in New Zealand
Leonardo was recognised as having the Best Flexible Working Policy
It was announced that Leonardo, alongside fellow combat air companies and the Ministry of Defence, had been conducting research with scientists at the cutting-edge of machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science and computing to support the development of software for Tempest

We hailed the announcement from the national defence industry leaders on the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) that the Convention on the Establishment of the “GCAP International Government Organisation (the GIGO)” had been signed by their respective governments
Our colleague, Simon Tutcher, was awarded the Sir Ralph Robins Medal Award at this year’s Royal Aeronautical Society’s Honours, Medals and Awards ceremony in London
We shared a deep-dive article looking at the growing threat of man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) for military and civil aviation
Colleagues shared their personal experiences of volunteering and the benefits that it brings to them and those around them

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