Trouble for Britain's Eurofighter Typhoon combat fighter

Britain’s fighter jets are running missions into Syria, dropping bombs on the Houthis in Yemen, patrolling over Estonia, Lithuania and Romania, close to Ukraine, and guarding our shores from interloping Russian bombers. And yet, the Typhoon final-assembly production line at Warton in Preston has effectively come to a halt. There are no new orders from the Ministry of Defence, and there is a battle going on between Typhoon supporters and those who want Britain’s military to have more American Lockheed Martin F-35 aircraft instead. The government is saying nothing because there is a strategic defence review underway. It’s an old, old story, rehearsed so many times in the past. Do you buy British/European military aircraft to save jobs, maintain technical skills and boost the economy, or give in to the salesmen from the giant US defence companies and opt for the American alternative? For the Labour government, desperate to prove it can generate growth in the economy (no sign of that yet) the answer should be straightforward: go British and save jobs. But defence procurement has never been simple, especially when embroiled in politics. The question mark over the future production of Typhoons at Warton arose this week when Steve McGuinness, a member of the Unite trade union executive council, reported in a letter to MPs on the Defence Committee: ‘As it stands, there are currently no Typhoons being final-assembled at the Warton site and no orders for future aircraft.’ ‘Essentially, production has stopped for British-built Typhoon aircraft,’ he wrote. He added: ‘We are becoming increasingly concerned with reports that the Typhoons being retired from active RAF service are to be replaced with American-built F-35 aircraft. This would be a hammer blow to the British aircraft industry and potentially could end the design, manufacture and assembly of fast jets in this country, seriously damaging our sovereign capability.’ The warning couldn’t have come at a worst time. On 3 and 4 December, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar which already has one squadron of Typhoons, will be in the UK for a state visit, with every expectation, or at least hope, that he will arrive with a new order for the jet aircraft. If the UK government fails to order more Typhoons for the RAF, how will that impact on the Emir’s strategic thinking about developing his nation’s air force? The Typhoon, which first came into service in 2003, was developed by a European consortium consisting of the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. Production arrangements are a mix-and-match process, with each nation partner contributing. Airbus Germany supplies the centre fuselage section, Airbus Spain the right wing, BAE Systems the front fuselage, the fin and, together with Leonardo from Italy, the rear fuselage. Leonardo also produces the left wing. The twin engines are built by a consortium of European companies which includes Rolls-Royce. There are four final assembly lines. BAE and Leonardo produce the aircraft at Warton in Lancashire. It’s a huge and complex production extravaganza, securing 100,000 jobs in Europe, with 25,000 of them in the UK. It involves 400 companies. With a predicted service life into the 2060s, new orders are crucial to keep the production lines moving. So far, the Typhoon has been a success story. Apart from purchases by the members of the consortium (680 aircraft), orders have also come from Austria (15), Qatar (24), Saudi Arabia (72), Kuwait (28) and Oman (12). Part of the reason for the high order numbers is that any breakthroughs in avionics and other technical advances have been incorporated as upgrades to the base model, ensuring over and over the Typhoon’s capability against potential adversarial air forces. The RAF ordered three tranches of Typhoons, a total of 160, the initial ones only air-defence versions, but later also ground-attack models. But the last order by the RAF was placed in 2009. There is a fourth tranche available which Germany has already ordered. At present the UK is the only member of the consortium with no new order for Typhoon jets. The Typhoon consortium faces hot competition, principally with the US F-35 and the French Rafale. Saudi Arabia, for example, which spent billions of dollars on the Tornado fighter jet and then on Typhoons, as well as US aircraft, is now considering buying 54 Rafales. However, this is not necessarily bad news for Typhoon. As Paul Beaver, veteran defence analyst and aviation historian, pointed out: ‘Saudi Arabia always hedges its bets. They’ll buy more Typhoons.’ Beaver is a strong Typhoon advocate and unfavourably compares the European jet with the F-35. ‘The F-35 only has a short range. Its time to target in air defence operations is five minutes less than a Spitfire in the 1940s [in other words, it runs out of fuel rapidly],’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have a lot of legs, so it needs tanking [air refuelling] and yet half of the RAF want more F-35s as opposed to buying additional Typhoons,’ he said. The future of the Typhoon for the RAF is all tied in with the next generation of combat aircraft, now being studied in a project with Japan and Italy called the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP). The programme is focusing on a sixth generation stealth fighter known as Tempest (which will replace Typhoon), an unmanned combat air vehicle called Loyal Wingman and some other autonomous platforms. The Eurofighter Typhoon is not a stealth fighter, although special materials were incorporated which make it hard to identify. Only 15 per cent of the aircraft is metal; the rest is made up of carbon fibre and other non-metal materials. The government has yet to make a long-term commitment to the GCAP programme, which leaves Tempest somewhat in the air, unless the defence review recommends the go ahead. Steve McGuiness was adamant in his letter to the defence committee in saying that the government should urgently commit to ordering a squadron of 24 more Typhoons while the review is underway. ‘A domestic order will not only fulfil a military requirement for the RAF in these unstable times but will also ensure that vital skills required to build the next generation aircraft [Tempest] are retained at Warton,’ he wrote. ‘Without a domestic order for Typhoon there will be no GCAP due to the loss of the skills necessary to build and fly aircraft.’ Staying in the business of building domestically-produced fighter aircraft is an immense investment, one that George Robertson, former Labour defence secretary and Nato secretary-general, and his team producing the defence review will be pondering over for the next few months. They’ll know the importance of Britain maintaining an industry capable of producing the most advanced fighter aircraft – particularly when two potential adversaries, Russia and China, are continuing to research and develop weapons platforms aimed at overcoming the West’s perceived superiority in military technology. China recently unveiled its own Shenyang J-35A fighter. It has striking similarities to the US F-35 joint strike fighter, although it could never be described as a direct copy. It was shown this week at the Zhuhai airshow in the southern province of Guangdong. This means China now has two fifth-generation stealth fighters – the J-35A and J-20 – making it only the second country in the world to have two such technologically advanced aircraft. The US has the F-35 and F-22. Russia has only one stealth fighter, the Sukhoi Su-57, but is developing a second called the Su-75 Checkmate.