Deadline: 23 July 2025
The ATI Programme funds industrial research and investment aid for research infrastructures to make the UK civil aerospace sector more competitive.
Focus Areas
- Your proposal must align with the UK Aerospace Technology Strategy, Destination Zero and is split into these areas:
- Zero Carbon Emission Aircraft Technologies: Zero carbon emission technologies are focused on propulsion and infrastructure development to enable zero carbon tailpipe emissions. This encompasses battery, hydrogen, and fuel cell technologies, much of which are in early stages of development.
- Ultra Efficient Aircraft Technologies: Ultra efficient technologies are focused on improving energy efficiency and hence impact CO2 emissions, NOx and noise. Continued development of crucial high value, sustainable, high productivity manufacturing technologies will position the UK to be a first choice location for the industry.
- Cross cutting Enabling Technologies: To enable both the zero carbon and ultra efficient opportunities, the UK must develop cross cutting enabling technologies and capabilities for whole aircraft design and analysis. These capabilities should extend to the aircraft lifecycle from design, through manufacture and assembly, operation, and end of life.
- Non-CO2 Technologies: Developing technologies and scaling up solutions to reduce the negative effects of non-CO2 emissions. Complimenting and in some instances spanning across the existing Destination Zero roadmaps, it covers three main research areas: fuel characteristics, aircraft technologies, and knowledge data and operations.
Funding Information
- The ATI Programme has been allocated £975 million from the government for the financial years 2025 to 2026 through 2029 to 2030 to fund innovation projects.
- Your project cannot be a mixture of industrial research and capital infrastructure investment.
- The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) know that demand is high for the ATI Programme. To manage this financial pressure, the DBT has applied an overall cap of 60% on project level funding for industrial research projects.
- Industrial research projects
- The total grant request in your application cannot exceed 60% of the total eligible project costs. This is regardless of the individual partners’ grant claims.
- Of that 60%, your funding request must not exceed the limits below. These limits apply even if your organisation normally acts non-economically.
- Individual partners that are conducting commercial or economic activities as part of the project, which may include research organisations, can request grant funding of up to:
- 70% if you are a small or micro organisation
- 60% if you are a medium sized organisation
- 50% if you are a large organization
- The total grant funding limit for any individual organisation is £18 million.
Ineligible Projects
- Projects they will not fund:
- They are not funding projects that are:
- focused solely on defence, space or other industrial sectors, but they will recognise dual use technologies providing the primary application is in civil aerospace
- for fundamental research, early-stage technologies or experimental development
- They cannot fund projects that are:
- dependent on export performance, for example, giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
- dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example, giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it uses 50% UK flour in their product
Eligibility Criteria
- Lead organisation:
- lead a project or work alone your organisation must:
- be a UK registered business of any size for research projects
- be a UK registered business of any size, a research and technology organisation (RTO), research organisation or academic institution for capital infrastructure projects
- carry out your aerospace research or capital infrastructure project work in the UK
- intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
- address the specific requirements of the UK’s Aerospace Technology Strategy
- sign up to the Aerospace Technology Institute framework agreement
- claim funding
- lead a project or work alone your organisation must:
For more information, visit GOV.UK.