Every published Brontanax figure describes the airframe. None describes the link, and the link is what makes a Collaborative Combat Aircraft collaborative. Range, bandwidth, latency, jam resistance and low probability of intercept together decide how far from its crewed teammate the aircraft can usefully operate and how much autonomy it needs when the connection degrades.
There is a hard trade at the centre of this. A high-bandwidth link that streams sensor video back to a Typhoon or Tempest cockpit gives the crew rich situational awareness, but it is emissive, detectable and jammable. A low-emission, burst-mode link is survivable but forces the aircraft to act on its own judgement between transmissions. The more contested the environment, the more the design is pushed towards the second option — and the more autonomy has to carry.
This is where the Ukraine experience is genuinely instructive for a high-end programme. Electronic warfare on that front has repeatedly shown that any predictable, continuously emitting control link will eventually be found and suppressed. Systems that survive are the ones that can complete a task with the link degraded or absent, and that assume denial as the normal condition rather than the exception.
For the UK there is an alliance dimension too. If Brontanax flies on a bespoke national waveform, only RAF crewed aircraft can direct it. If it adopts NATO-standard teaming interfaces, a Norwegian or Dutch F-35 could in principle task it — which is the difference between a UK niche product and a coalition capability. That decision is being made now, largely invisibly, in mission-system meetings rather than at airshows.
Watch for the word "interoperable" in future MoD language, and for any mention of standards work alongside GCAP partners. Those are the tells. The airframe will be photographed endlessly; the link will decide what the airframe is actually worth.