The agreements, worth £80 million, secure ongoing service and repairs for key avionics equipment such as displays, flight controls and Helmet Mounted Displays.
“Eurofighter avionics support contracts will help keep Typhoon aircraft mission ready
BAE Systems will continue to service and support the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft’s avionics for the platform’s founding nations’ air forces in Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Italy, for the next five years.”
Avionics service and support is a core focus for BAE Systems’ facility in Rochester, UK.
“BAE Systems’ avionics service and support team helps our customers ensure that Typhoon is ready to secure our skies and support the UK’s international allies 24/7, 365 days a year,” said Jim Whittington, senior project manager at BAE Systems’ Rochester, UK facility.
“The flexibility within these services will help increase our customers’ flying capability, whereby we are able to meet any additional service demands.”
BAE add here that the integrated team based at RAF Coningsby is embedded into the Typhoon Total Availability Enterprise contract, and they work closely to troubleshoot and undertake repairs.
“Their guaranteed turnaround times allow the customer to accurately plan aircraft operations. Eurofighter is Europe’s largest defence programme. In addition to technological capabilities, the programme secures more than 100,000 jobs in Europe. At present, 681 Eurofighter aircraft have been sold to nine nations.”
Very necessary work to keep them current and relevant.
I was going to say this is great news but to be honest it’s simply necessary upkeep work. What would be great news is the MoD buying another squadron of Typhoons and a couple of upengined/upgraded F35As for the RAF.
What would make sense would be to replace T1 with the same spec as T3.5 (radar2 etc EW) so as to keep number flat and capability rising.
F35A – no
Focus on having enough Typhoon and F35B with munitions stocks to do the job.
Our issue is the UK Typhoon assembly line will stop after the Qatari Typhoons are delivered. As the driving nation behind the Typhoon its sad it will not be us continuing to manufacture the jet and demoted to just parts manufacturer for other nations.
I would be worried what happens to the people and how does this keep the skill base for building tempest.
If tempest is to enter service in 2035 hopefully they will start building 2032 prototypes etc. So how many typhoons are needed to bough to keep the line running I wonder.
Perhaps BAE have worked it out and got the folks moving else where in the business
With a potential shooting war on the near horizon. Selling airframes at a slight loss would be preferable to losing the manufacturing capability. Offer them to Taiwan at a budget price and recoup some of the loss with spares and servicing. Or let them pay with high end chips and semiconductors for Tempest. I’ve got nothing against bartering, it is afterall the oldest form of commerce.
I heard they were already ordering the equipment to regear the line from Typhoon to Tempest. Work already started on manufacturing the flying demonstrator.
That would be unbelievably fast.
Wait for this to. E slowed down as was Typhoon by ‘it being incredibly expensive’ so we need ‘more partners’ the reality is the too many fingers slows things down more and makes them even more expensive!
I believe BAe are still trying to sell the Typhoon and its too early to setup a line for Tempest. As you say the first Tempest airframe will be a prototype like the EFA which proceeded the Typhoon.
It’s criminal that we are going to lose yet another military industrial capability. We should be keeping that production line open, even if it means selling them at a small loss. Until we can buy more airframes for the RAF. I’m sure nations such as Taiwan would love to buy Typhoon at a bargain basement price.
The country will need all the specialists it can train if Tempest ever flies.
I understand can you imagine if this was shipbuilding coming to an end in the UK the unions, press and posters on here would be going nuts.
One thing we know from this is fighter jets are very expensive to buy and run.
But they are also indispensable. When a country needs them, nothing else will do.
Yes indeed. By the time you have a few here and a few there..a few in the Falklands, how many does that leave in the UK discounting some in maintenance/repair? 50? 60?
Although any “enemy” aircraft attacking us would likely have to pass over continental Europe, numbers are very thin indeed especially when keeping up patrols due to our almost total lack of “robust” air defence missile capability. Are are some of those winds farms a disguised capability?.??
Parking a few T45 around the north would fix this nicely, but we don’t even have the numbers for that!
AA