Eurofighter Typhoon - Updates and Discussions
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Technology enhancements to boost Eurofighter sales appeal, BAE says
BAE Systems is moving into a busy few months of flight-testing involving numerous enhancements for the Eurofighter Typhoon, as it also continues to eye further export opportunities for the type.
www.flightglobal.com
Orders still being built...
28 x Typhoon Tranche 3 to Kuwait
24 x Typhoon Tranche 3 to Qatar
Total - 52 Typhoon
Ordered or 'due to be...' - On contract in Bold
38 x Typhoon Tranche 4 to Germany under Project Quadriga
20 x Typhoon to Germany under 'Project Quadriga 2'?
15 x Typhoon EK to Germany - Now called EK instead of ECR. Airbus has said is unlikely that just 15 will be ordered. However, these are upgrades of existing airframes*
20 x Typhoon Tranche 4 to Spain under Project Halcon, to replace oldest EF-18
25 x Typhoon 4 to Spain under Project Halcon 2, to replace some of the remaining EF-18 (64 in total remaining, plus 13 AV-8B+).
24 x Typhoon Tranche 3 to Egypt - Still not ordered, has gone quiet.....will Israel/Palestine/Yemen etc force the issue? Might move to potential in future as no news recently....
Total - 127 Typhoon * Typhoon EK added in for completeness, but not in the Total as the initial 15 will be conversions of existing aircraft.
Potential Orders...in order of probability...
24 x Typhoon to Italy - Was rumoured, and denied, by credible sources...but has now been confirmed by Airbus CEO
30 (up to) x Typhoon Tranche 4/5/LTE? to Germany to replace non-nuclear Tornado - Reduced to 30 from 50 due to 'Quadriga 2', expected in next budget cycle. But...'next budget cycle' could mean more F-35 or nothing...
48-72 x Typhoon to Saudi Arabia - Added in 72 as increased buy has been mentioned. 48 is more likely..
15 x Typhoon EK to Germany - Second batch of new build EK
25 x Typhoon to Spain - Potential up to another 25 under a 'Project Halcon III', bumped up the list as rumours from Spain recently have significantly downplayed F-35....perhaps only a small number of F-35B will be ordered if at all.
12 x Typhoon to Qatar - Qatar have an option on an additional 12 a/c from their current contract
24 - 48 x Typhoon to Turkey - Keeps popping up, 'sources' have said '2 Sqn's' Or 48..
24 x Typhoon to Poland - Poland appears to want more fighters and Eurofighter have been pitching it heavily...normally you'd assume F-35 would be in the lead, but the Poles don't seem averse to multiple platforms in any domain and they may want cover in case the US gets Trump again...
12-24 x Typhoon to Malaysia - An ongoing saga... since the 2000's. The MRCA requirement. However, Malaysia has had issues with SU-30MKI reliability and their concerns will only increase post Ukraine war, FA-18D is also, generally, on the way out. They can't afford to be an orphan operator for long post 2030 with 8 a/c. Issues around EU palm oil ban, but the UK being out of the EU could help...either way its a slow burner...still serious finance issues. I think they're unlikely to go Russian or Chinese, KF-21 likely frontrunner after the recent TA-50 win for S.Korea in the LCA competition, however that is mired in the usual corruption allegations...
Total - 214-274 x Typhoon
Airbus reveals futuristic wingman concept, teams with German startup Helsing for AI tech - Breaking Defense
Under the terms of the co-operation agreement, Airbus intends on providing “its expertise in the interaction of unmanned and manned military aircraft,” while Helsing will “contribute its AI stack of relevant software-defined mission capabilities."
Even the US say that the F-16 and Super hornet are dearer than what avweek says
I think some others added to the Euro pot. Considering that the Typhoon and Rafale were ejected from the Finnish competition. The F-35 was cheaper and they didn't pass the cost gate.
It was even cheaper than the Gripen
nationalinterest.org
“It was a tough race,” Finnish defense minister Antti Kaikkonen reportedly said in a press conference announcing the decision. Lockheed Martin competed for the tender with Boeing’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab Gripen E, and Dassault Rafale. Nevertheless, the F-35 appeared to beat its opponents handily—the fighter scored 4.47 on the capability test, with the next top-performing contender receiving only 3.81 points. "When comparing military performance, the F-35 best met our needs," Kaikonnen added. According to the Defense Ministry, the Lightning II scored highest in development potential and cost-effectiveness. “The F-35 was the cheapest in terms of purchase price…” read the Defense Ministry statement. “The operating and maintenance costs of the system are below the set annual cost limit of 254 million Euros [around $286 million at the current rate of exchange]. The operation and lifecycle development of the F-35 is possible with the resources of the Defense Forces. None of the bids were significantly cheaper in terms of operating and maintenance costs.”
I think some others added to the Euro pot. Considering that the Typhoon and Rafale were ejected from the Finnish competition. The F-35 was cheaper and they didn't pass the cost gate.
It was even cheaper than the Gripen
The F-35 Beat Out the Competition to Become Finland’s Fighter Jet of Choice
Finland’s decision settles one of the last open fighter procurement competitions in Europe, with Helsinki becoming the fourteenth nation to ink a contract for the F-35.
nationalinterest.org
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Luftwaffe soll Brimstone 3 für den Eurofighter erhalten
Nachdem die Bundeswehr bereits 2017 den Einstieg in die Nutzung der Luft-Boden-Rakete Brimstone 3 für den Anfang dieser Dekade angekündigt hatte, erfolgt jetzt die Umsetzung.
www.hartpunkt.de
They know that their F-16s are no match to Greek Air Force's Rafales. So they want to buy Typhoon to counter its other Euro-Canard brother.
They are also desperate to acquire F-35s from US. Greek Rafales have really scared them, lol. @Picdelamirand-oil, @randomradio
Fate, Luck and Choice – Truth versus Honesty – The Eurofighter Oscillation
I have never worked for an organization that overtly lied to a customer, but I have been involved in programs where leaders certainly were not forthcoming about product issues or problems encountered in development.In my world, there is a clear distinction between Truth and Honesty.
My first encounter with Truth versus Honesty was as a test pilot on Eurofighter Typhoon. Early in its development, I encountered a severe oscillation during aerial refueling which ultimately led to a complete redesign of the flight control system, 7 years after first flight. The tale was one of blame and obfuscation, trying to hide from an issue that no one wanted to acknowledge or fix. At a time of very fragile political support for Eurofighter, a very bad news story could certainly have wreaked havoc on the program’s hopes for success. While the program ultimately solved the technical issue, the ethical dilemma tainted my view of Eurofighter and every subsequent test program that I flew in.
Eurofighter DA-1
In July 2001, I was conducting a flight control evaluation on the 1st Eurofighter prototype, known as DA-1 (DA stood for Developmental Aircraft), flying out of our test site north of Munich, Germany. The prototype Eurofighter had virtually no avionics or sophistication. DA-1 was meant as a testbed to evaluate the EJ-200 engines, the aircraft structure, and the very complex flight control system of Eurofighter. On occasion, we were able to extend mission duration using a locally-based Tornado jet configured with a refueling pod to allow buddy-buddy refueling.
On this particular mission, I finished my first set of tests and met up with the Tornado to refuel. I had extensive aerial refueling experience in the CF-18, CF-5, Tornado and Eurofighter jets which all had probe and drogue refueling systems. My recent experience was from combat in Kosovo where we refueled multiple times on every mission. My technique was conservative, always aligning fuselage references during my approach and never cheating by looking at the aerial refueling basket. I had learned the hard way, from my own mistakes and from watching others.
Eurofighter was a magnificent flying jet, not an agile fighter like the F-16 and not a great slow speed fighter like the CF-18, but it was smooth to fly. I always thought of flying Eurofighter like how it must be to drive a Bentley versus a Ferrari, smooth and elegant versus aggressive and nimble. And my refueling experience with Typhoon had been so impressive to that point, the easiest aircraft to refuel of the jets that I had flown to that point.
And so for the first time, with lots of confidence in the Typhoon’s smooth flight control responses, I cheated and looked at the basket during my aerial refueling attempt, abandoning my hard learned lessons. And I missed. I had a tip-off; didn’t damage DA-1 but the aircraft reactions were weird. I was completely out of sync with my pilot inputs versus how the aircraft responded. After I missed the attempt, I backed away, reverted to my normal technique, didn’t look at the basket and plugged back in. Once full of fuel, I returned to my test mission and finished the day.
After I landed, on my way to debrief the flight, I came across one of our flight control engineers and told him about my event and observations. By the time I was finished my debrief with the test team, he had reviewed the aircraft behavior and met me with the news. I had triggered a Pilot Induced Oscillation (PIO) that had likely been dormant in the aircraft for all of the 7 years that Eurofighter had been flying.
We had a 180-millisecond time delay in the longitudinal axis of the flight control system which is a significant delay between when I made an input, and the aircraft responded. And while that seems like a tiny number, in a fighter, it is easy to notice and leads to oscillations between what the pilot wants and how the aircraft behaves. We had a problem! There is no way this could be permitted to exist in this new fighter that cost multi-Millions. I wrote a report on the issue which triggered a furious response across the Eurofighter program and our German company.
Eurofighter – The Canadian Problem
The Canadian Problem
There couldn’t be anything wrong with the jet. Obviously, I did not know how to refuel properly…. didn’t have the right technique. Program Managers laid blame: clearly, it was a pilot problem.. The engineers responsible for designing how the flight controls worked defended their system and also asserted that it was a pilot problem. Even my German Chief Test Pilot refuted my observations, went out and re-flew the mission, to prove that Eurofighter could refuel without a problem, to then come back and decree that it was absolutely me as the issue, not the aircraft. It was a ‘Canadian’ Problem. And so the Blame Game had begun as everyone tried to bury the issue.
The Canadian, Italian, and Brit Problem
For weeks after my oscillation event, nothing was done to analyze what had happened or to think about working on a fix.
Until the same oscillation happened to the Italian Chief Test Pilot.
During aerial refueling, he encountered the same event, reported it, and got the same response from our program and engineers. Soon, the PIO became the ‘Canadian and Italian’ problem.
And that continued until a tip-off happened to the Royal Air Force Chief Test Pilot…then it became a ‘Canadian, Italian, Brit’ problem. As absurd as it may seem, it took 3 aerial refueling oscillation events from 3 different pilots in 3 different countries for the program managers and engineers to finally acknowledge that we had a real issue that needed to be dealt with.
The program had tried to hide the PIO. While the customer test pilots knew about it, this was certainly not news that anyone wanted to be broadcast out to the media or public. A severe oscillation triggered during an essential operational task would have meant a ton of bad press from media. So many politicians were already questioning the value of the Eurofighter program and its enormous expense at a time when peace had broken out around the western world. No one could imagine something unforeseen occurring with such risks to flight safety; let alone the costs and time that would be needed to fix a problem.
DA-1 Flying over Manching, Germany
What is a Pilot Induced Oscillation (PIO)?
A pilot’s input to the control stick should drive the aircraft to move and behave as he expects. Quick, abrupt pilot inputs to correct bad positioning that triggers the aircraft moving on its own without the pilot controlling risks severe consequences, a collision with another aircraft or even the aircraft going out of control. If during aerial refueling, the pilot makes an input to reposition the fighter and a PIO is triggered, then that oscillation could lead to the fighter ripping the aerial refueling basket and hose attached to the refueler aircraft off, damaging both the tanker and potentially the fighter with a basket and hose banging away on the side or top of the fighter. Flying in formation during transit through bad weather, and the pilot making quick abrupt inputs to stay in position so that he can see the lead aircraft might trigger a PIO which could lead to a collision between the two aircraft. In this case, 7 years had elapsed since Eurofighter had first flown and untold numbers of engineering hours, time flying the simulator and test flights had been dedicated to ensuring that Typhoon had a safe and robust flight control system that would never be susceptible to a PIO. Yet we had one, dormant in the flight control system for all those years. No wonder the engineers refused to accept that there was a problem that had been lurking there all along. We had uncovered one of the most feared and dangerous issues that any fighter could face. We needed to investigate this PIO phenomena and fix the flight control system so that it could never occur again.
The Typhoon Oscillation was a singular event discovered well into the development of Eurofighter and became a lightning rod due to risks of costs, program delays, flight safety and visibility from the outside world. That oscillation pushed the Eurofighter program and especially our company over the cliff and uncovered the distinction of Truth versus Honesty.
I always say that you need hard data to back up our pilot observations. That logic did not work in this case even though we had hard data showing the flight control problem. In a fighter program that struggled to get political, public and media support, the Program Managers thought that they needed to deflect and hide the issue. Program managers trying to save their asses cause more problems than if they had understood the difference between Truth and Honesty with their customers and had been transparent up front. The months of delays blaming individual pilots instead of acknowledging what the data said and tackling the problem caused cascading effects. The more delayed, the longer Eurofighter could not refuel and the costlier it all became to fix.
What is Truth vs Honesty?
I am often asked to explain what I mean about the difference between Truth and Honesty. Here’s an example:
When asked a direct question, the response is always truthful.
The customer asks: “Did the jet fly today?”
And the contractor replies: “Yes, the jet flew today.” …that was truthful.
But if the question wasn’t deep enough, the contractor certainly wasn’t going to offer up more unsolicited info.
If the customer had asked: “Did the jet fly OK today?”
The contractor would have replied: “Actually, no, it flew horribly today. We found a huge oscillation problem that will cost millions to fix and cause a significant disruption in the development of the jet.” …that was the honest answer…but the customer would not have heard that unless he asked the very specific question, and the contractor certainly was not going to offer up that answer unsolicited.
Collaboration
We needed to get beyond the Blame Game and move forward. My great mentor, Rogers Smith, former NASA test pilot, helped me understand how collaborating with one of our customer test pilots would allow us to outflank the antagonists who were still in denial. I teamed up with my German Air Force test pilot colleague and friend Robert Hierl. Robbs was an exemplary test pilot, technically astute, beyond honest, and passionate about flight testing. Robbs and I became a tight pair who together conducted the oscillation investigation, helped develop the fix and flew the missions to validate the flight control system. Flying in formation with an F-4, Robbs and I discovered we could trigger the oscillation with as little as two abrupt inputs to put ourselves out of sync and fly a bucking bronco, sustained in the oscillation next to the F-4. The investigation technique introduced from NASA and the United States Air Force using aggressive handling qualities techniques vice the more deliberate and smooth evaluations that the program had used to that point in time helped uncover the problem as well as ensure that our flight control fix had eliminated any oscillation tendencies.
Program managers couldn’t point fingers at a test pilot team that had a customer pairing. And with the customer test pilot unencumbered by the company program pressures, he could be honest about the problem, explain why it needed to be fixed and ultimately how the fix was working. There is no perfect solution to each and every problem. In our case, teaming with our customer to manage the technical issue forced the management and the antagonists to shift their focus from Blame Gaming to begrudgingly supporting our investigation as we solved the problem.
The Choice – Being Honest in a Nest of Thieves
When the massive Eurofighter program came ready to gun me down, I held my ground. It was interesting to be singled out, including by our Chief Test Pilot who expressly went out to repeat the air refueling test and prove me wrong. All the years of flight control development had failed to be aggressive and robust enough to ferret out the problems that had been dormant in the Eurofighter’s flight control system from the beginning. You can’t fall on your sword each and every time you think that you are right…trust me, I have done that far too many times in my test pilot career and have lots of scars to prove it. But this was one of those times to be right and stand by my convictions. I knew there was a really serious issue that could become explosive in the hands of an unsuspecting pilot and potentially lead to an accident. Luckily, I was supported by my mentor who helped with access to NASA’s flight control techniques and evaluation criteria.
I wasn’t proved right until an Italian and then Brit found the same issue that everyone relented.
So What?
Always ask: what does all of this mean to me?
Truth versus Honesty doesn’t fit only in our flight test world. The dilemma happens in all businesses and politics. We have the obligation to be honest, not just truthful replying to issues. Being upfront, always transparent, pays off in the long run. Lots of people in business cheat to get ahead. And in the corporate world, with sharks circling all the time feeding on the weak, why risk airing your dirty laundry? So many times, people are keen to hide problems at least until the issues are fixed. It’s hard to teach everyone that honesty is the best policy (like we all learned in Kindergarten). We build trust with honesty and watch it all get washed away when those hidden issues are found out.
What business succeeds with its customers when the contractor hides everything away from the buyer? In so many cases that I know of, it blows up in their faces and the companies find themselves in a much deeper hole to dig out of. In the complex, uber-expensive world of hi-tech development there is never a quick solution, and that one problem won’t be the only one; there will always be more issues and problems to fix.
Not since 1957, when Kelly Johnson was leading the Lockheed Skunk Works company and built the U-2 spy plane has an aircraft development program finished on time and on budget. Since then, every single major aircraft program has had huge issues to overcome.
Honesty builds trust and when your customer has to hear about yet another unexpected, unplanned problem, is he going to support you figuring out how to fix it? Or have you crushed any hope of trust along the way by trying to hide issues previously. Clearly the former is a better place to be. And then in the latter case, the customer is going to make it very difficult for you to solve your problem…. which will be well deserved.
In the Trillion-dollar F-35 development program, we wanted that trust and always needed to be transparent with our customer. We needed the customer to believe that they were getting the honest side of us each time. And through extreme frustration when we failed, especially at the beginning when F-35 over-promised and under-delivered, we had to work hard over a long time to build back trust.
When I arrived at Naval Air Station Pax River to fly the F-35, there was precious little trust between the military and company test pilots. It took some time and turnover, flushing out a couple of bad eggs on both sides, to get our team in a place of trust. We were honest and ensured that our military test pilots were intimately involved in everything we did as company test pilots.
But it is hard to teach honesty. The short-term answer is to hope that you can get by. The hard part is to buy into honesty and have the conviction that being open and transparent will pay off long-term.
So that’s why it matters!
Eurofighter was not honest…back in my time. F-35 worked hard to be…in my time.
