After the F-22 Raptor the Eurofighter is considered by many experts to be the most advanced fighter now in development.
The fighter incorporates a high level of stealth technology, but primarily as an afterthought. It lacks the internal weapons carriage, and careful internal and external design features of the F-22.
History
In the late 1970s, a number of European air forces were confronted with the fact that their fighter fleets were beginning to seem outdated in the face of new American machines, such as the F-15 and F-16, and more to the point new Soviet fighter designs, such as the MiG-29 and Su-27. These hot new machines would certainly be followed by improved designs, and so the Europeans had to keep pace.
BAE and Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Bohm (MBB) began to discuss a collaboration, resulting in 1979 in a proposed design for a "European Collaborative Fighter (ECF)", later the "European Combat Aircraft (ECA)". The ECA resembled the MBB TKF-90 design.
Dassault was also generating a number of advanced fighter designs, but did little or nothing to tell anyone else about them, and the French position was that if they were going to be in an international collaboration, they would be in the driver's seat. The French attitude led to the collapse of intergovernmental talks on collaboration in 1980.
The British government cancelled the ECA program in 1981, while the West German government showed no interest in funding development of the TKF-90. That might have been the end of the whole thing, but BAE management realized that European air forces would need a new fighter sooner or later, and pressed on.
BAE was able to inspire the Anglo-German-Italian "Panavia" consortium, which had built the Tornado, to collaborate on another machine, the "Agile Combat Aircraft (ACA)", which was based on TKF-90 and other BAE design concepts. The Italians were very interested in the ACA since they had an urgent need for a replacement for their F-104 Starfighters. A mockup of the ACA was displayed at the Farnborough Air Show in the UK in 1982 and at the Paris Air Show in 1983.
As an answer to the ACA initiative, the French committed to develop a fourth-generation fighter of their own, under the "Avion de Combate Experimentale (ACX)" program, which would become the Dassault Rafale. The British were perfectly happy to have the French go their own way, since the French had shown a clear tendency to short-change the British in other aircraft collaborations, such as the Jaguar. The West German government, however, was very keen on political alignment with the French and had misgivings about the ACA program.
In any case, ACA went ahead for the moment, with plans generated for the production of two demonstrators under the "Experimental Aircraft Programme (EAP)"; if building a new fighter seemed to be taking time, production of acronyms was at full steam. On 26 May 1983, the British Ministry of Defense awarded BAE and Aeritalia, the Italian partner, a contract for one of the EAPs, and the expectation was that the Germans would quickly commit to construction of the second demonstrator.
As it emerged, the EAP demonstrator featured the cranked-delta / canard configuration of the various concepts that led up to it, but differed from them in having a single tailfin instead of twin tailfins. This was because MBB had been expected to provide the rear fuselage elements of the EAP, but when their funding was cut BAE simply used the rear section of a Tornado, including the tailfin. The EAP also used the Tornado's twin TurboUnion RB.199 afterburning turbofan engines. The intakes were placed under the belly, and had a hinged panel on the lower lip that could be dropped open to ensure airflow at high angles of attack.
The EAP demonstrator performed its first flight on 8 August 1986 and conducted 259 test flights up to its retirement on 1 May 1991. Pilots were wildly enthusiastic about the machine.
Beginning in late 1983, the air staffs of five European nations -- Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain -- began to work together to define specifications for a common fourth-generation fighter aircraft, to go into service in the mid-1990s. By early 1985, Britain, West Germany, Italy, and Spain had settled on a design along the lines of the EAP demonstrator, in construction at the time, while the French were insisting on an aircraft derived from the "Rafale A" demonstrator. The French position was just as blunt as it had been before: France would be in the driver's seat, the aircraft would be a French design, built by a consortium with Dassault at the head and France as the absolute majority partner. Dassault would essentially parcel out such subcontracts as deemed necessary.
The friction might have been at least partly due to miscommunications. Nobody could have objected much if the French said they were working on a program of their own and invited risk-sharing partners to sign on; modern international aircraft programs are often organized in such a way. However, if everyone else was thinking in terms of a collaboration in which they had a more or less equal say in the program, the French attitude was a non-starter, to put it mildly. A British official commented: "One wonders what France would have demanded had it not been interested in collaboration and had it simply wanted to put us off the idea." Over the course of the last half of 1985, the French and the other nations involved in the discussions parted ways, though the West Germans were not happy about dropping the French from the proposed partnership.
Although Britain and Spain wanted a multirole fighter, West Germany and Italy were only interested in an air-superiority machine. The group managed to hammer out their differences, with a general agreement on specifications reached in December 1985. A formal specification for the "EFA (European Fighter Aircraft)" was released in September 1987, with production expected to begin in 1992. As it turned out, this was short of the mark by a decade.
The Eurofighter
The EFA was focused on air superiority, but could perform ground attack as a secondary mission. It was to have high performance, be highly maneuverable, and have docile handling characteristics. It was also to have a low radar cross section (RCS) and be capable of operating from short forward airstrips. A formal development contract was awarded to the "EuroFighter" consortium on 23 November 1988, specifying delivery of eight prototypes.
The principal manufacturers in the consortium were, in order of workshare: BAE Systems of the UK (33%); MBB (later DASA) of Germany (33%), Aeritalia (later Alenia) of Italy (21%); and CASA of Spain (13%). DASA and CASA are now part of the EADS aerospace group.
The "EJ.200" engine for the new fighter was to be developed by the parallel "EuroJet" group, which includes Rolls-Royce, MTU, Fiat Avio, and SENER (now ITP) of Spain. The EJ.200 is an evolution of the RB.199, derived from the Rolls-Royce "XG40" demonstrator engine built in the early days of the EuroFighter program. The EJ.200 was to provide better performance and 30% fewer parts than the RB.199.
The insistence of the British and Spanish on a multirole capability was important to the machine's survival. The fall of the Soviet Union greatly changed the nature of the challenge faced by European nations from a hostile Communist monolith to the East, to unpredictable brushfire conflicts that could spring up almost anywhere. A multirole EuroFighter fit the new challenges well.
The formal decision to go ahead with production was made in 1997, with production contracts awarded in 1998. In September 1998, the EuroFighter organization announced the aircraft's name of "Typhoon". This name was assigned for export aircraft, and the organization stressed that member nations would be free to name it what they liked. However, Typhoon was a good choice for a name, since it was assigned to historically important British and German aircraft, and the word itself is derived from Japanese and so reflects no linguistic bias among the EuroFighter group member nations.
Since the aircraft was still not in production, much less operational service, by the year 2000, the various factions involved in the effort gradually began to refer to the aircraft as simply the "EuroFighter" and not the "EuroFighter EF2000". Despite all the problems and delays -- which were not unique to the EuroFighter among the fourth-generation fighter efforts, and to an extent were inevitable in a multinational collaboration -- the result appears to be no disappointment.
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The airframe is built of about 50% composite materials by weight and about 70% by surface area, with substantial use of titanium and lithium-aluminum alloys elsewhere. Metals only make up 15% of the materials used in the Eurofighter. Although comparable in dimensions to the Tornado, the EuroFighter has an empty weight only about 70% as great, while being more capable in almost all regards. The advanced construction techniques also reduces the parts count of the airframe, with the EuroFighter having about 16,000 structural elements to 36,000 for the Tornado.
While the EuroFighter has a greater RCS than the US F-22 or F-35, radar-absorbent material is used in the inlets and around the cockpit, and the composite assemblies were designed with an eye towards reducing RCS.
In March 2006, the Eurofighter finally entered service in the RAF, with the first operational Typhoon squadron formed on March 31st.
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Jul. 1st, 2008 | Pilot tackles Typhoons during exchange duty in England
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Jun. 30th, 2008 | Eurofighter Typhoon Begins Air Surveillance in Austria
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Jun. 18th, 2008 | Typhoon proves its air-surface capability
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May. 3rd, 2008 | RAF Eurofighter damaged during wheels-up landing incident
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Specifications
| Version | Eurofighter |
| Length | 52.36ft 14.9 6m |
| Height | 17.3ft 5.28m |
| Wingspan | 36ft 10.95m |
View all the specs and compare them with other aircraft!
Eurofighter Typhoon Videos | 956 Videos Available!
First 5 videos, click to go to the Eurofighter Typhoon video gallery:
Sources & Recommended Websites:
Information from and various EADS press releases.
This article is part of the public domain.
This page was last updated on: 2006-04-04
