The MoD and Rolls-Royce have signed a contract worth almost £350 million to support the EJ200 engines on the Typhoon.
The £346.7 million contract, signed with Rolls-Royce, will provide maintenance support for the EJ200 engine up to 2024.
Already this year, Typhoon jets have led the fight against Daesh in Iraq and Syria as part of Operation Shader and undertaken Baltic Air Policing mission with NATO partners, with further NATO policing missions planned in Iceland later this year according to the Royal Air Force in a news release.
Minister for Defence Procurement Anne-Marie Trevelyan said:
“Not only will this contract help to maintain our world-class jets, it secures 175 jobs across the UK and boosts the skills base our world-leading defence industry relies upon.Together with our multi-million-pound upgrade programme, this contract will ensure our Typhoon fleet continues to dominate the skies in the decades to come.”
Approximately 175 Rolls-Royce jobs in Bristol, RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire and RAF Lossiemouth in Moray will be supported as part of the contract, say the firm.
Rolls-Royce will repair and maintain the Typhoon engines as required by the RAF over the five-year period. They will also be responsible for the provision of modules, spares and accessories to support the aircraft fleet, including the transportation of the equipment between RAF bases and the Rolls Royce manufacturing facility in Bristol.
Air Marshal Julian Young, Chief of Materiel (Air), Defence Equipment & Support, said:
“Typhoon is a formidable, battle-winning aircraft and the backbone of UK Combat Airpower. This new deal on EJ200 engine is demonstrable evidence that we remain committed to working with our industrial partners to drive down support costs and at the same time pursue excellence and deliver great equipment to the Front Line.”
Is there any news on whether the Typhoon is getting the new more powerful engines that have been mentioned?
With thrust vectoring?
Never heard Typhoon ever getting thrust vectoring. That would be a major and very expensive upgrade.
And CAPTOR-E. What’s the score with that?
There are a lot of extremely worthwhile upgrades to Typhoon hovering in the wings if only the funding and political will can be put in place.
As with any upgrade program only a third of the fleet will ever be upgraded because of cost. The spin on this reasoning is that we will not need the same number of airframes because the upgrade programmes will be super duper and terrify the pants off our adversaries. In the meantime the operational commitments will not reduce in an ever changing world.
I think upgraded engines are pretty low on the list of updates for the Typhoon. She already has very good thrust to weight performance and an AESA radar among other things are much higher on the list.
Meanwhile, back in Belfast, Harland and Woolf has been allowed to go to the Wall. A sad and shameful situation.
Labour is cheaper abroad. We cant keep sustaining none competitive businesses. Its not HMGs fault alone
with the collapse of Sterling, that position will be debatable.
The cost of labour is definitely not the issue. Just a complete lack of forward planning by government and industry. Constant delays to mod contracts to generate short term savings but destroy industry and hollow out capability in the hope we don’t need it and lack of support to diversify into other fields be it cruise ships or renewable. Government support for British industry outside of BAE and RR has been completely non existent.
H&W hasn’t build a ship in over 15 years. The owners have aimed the business at the wind and other offshore businesses just not very successfully. This closure is down to a poorly run business, the MOD has no part to play.
@ ATH – very true for recent years although the drop in oil price will have had an effect as much as business decisions but to me (and this was a Government not just MoD decision) the carriers should have been assembled in Belfast not Rosyth.
@ BB85 – I think Babcock, Cammell Laird, A & P, Thales UK, Cobham, Marshall, MBDA, Leonardo UK and a few thousand other companies will strongly disagree with your insular assessment.
The one criticism I will lay at Government’s door is that the two carriers should have been assembled at H & W (which has built hundreds of very large ships including carriers) not Rosyth (which had never ever built a ship only repair them) for one simple reason – All the various modules (with the one exception of A & P Tyneside) were built on the West side of the UK and therefore closer to Belfast. H & W had capable cranes already there and two massive dry docks. So we would have saved £80 Mn plus the cost of that Chinese crane (now for sale on eBay) right off. But then Belfast’s MP was not Chancellor and Prime Minister …
@Chris H.Are you suggesting less than honorable motives to one of our exemplary politicians? Surely, that cannot be the case. They are the best of us – their bar being set so high, above which we can only aspire to aim, the better to improve ourselves. These makers of Laws, these setters of standards; ethical humility and service, their watchwords. It could not be so!
(Note to self: Stop eating mushrooms!)
@ Derek – While I really should not comment further I actually think yes I was saying just that …
Cracking post though Derek…
Typhoon in its current incarnation is not short of power. And there isn’t yet a directed energy weapon (laser) small enough for it to carry.
If you follow Project Tempest you will see that the MoD is indeed funding experiments to upgrade EJ200 with the REL pre-cooler. So by the time Tempest actually comes along and we do need a more powerful engines, one will be available.
There was also a German potential upgrade that was being studied of getting around 15% more performance from the existing engine through conventional tweaks. That upgrade was being offered to new customers.
Yes a few aerodynamic tweaks from what I remember from the article, haven’t heard anything since.
@watcherzero – If you mean the ‘EJ2x0’ upgrade this was entirely Rolls Royce not ‘German’. Eurojet GMBH is based like Eurofighter GMBH in Germany for purely political reasons (something else we gave away far too easily IMHO). The majority shareholding in Eurojet is held by Rolls Royce UK (on whose XG-40 engine the EJ200 is based anyway), ITP which is RR’s Spanish wholly owned subsidiary and AVIO which is owned by Cinven UK Equity and Leonardo (now partnering in Tempest)
The German element (MTU Aero) is a minority workshare holder. Daimler actually sold its 50% shareholding of the MTU large diesel engine business to its partner RR in 2014 and was renamed Rolls Royce Power Systems.
Therein lies the main reasons why the Airbus / Dassault EU Dream Machine was never going to get its hands on the EJ200 let alone its upgraded versions which will now go into Tempest.
Sounds very similar to the reports that GE has improvements to performance for the Hornet’s, Gripen GE414 engine but finding the funds to upgrade the engines is nearly impossible nowadays. Many more urgent needs.
A lot of people have been asking when will RAF Typhoons get the CAPTOR-E AESA radar. Today, BAE has announced that an enhanced version of the Captor-E radar will have a ‘target date’ for delivery of around 2024 as part of the Phase IV Enhancement package for British aircraft. This is the next ongoing development for RAF Typhoons now that Project Centurion is now complete. Kuwait and Qatar will receive their Typhoons with the baseline block 0 Captor-E.
BAE’s have said that the Phase IV enhancement program will include upgrades to the PIRATE IRST and Striker II helmet with further integration of the Lighning 5 targeting pod. I have a feeling they will also include the same engine enhancement that has been offered to Kuwait and Qatar, that gives an additional 15% in performance.
They also mentioned that the RAF will receive the last Typhoon ordered under the current contract this year. Nothing has been said about upgrading the Tranche 1 aircraft like the Italians have done or ordering additional new aircraft to fill the numbers gap now that Tornado has been retired.
Damn they keep pushing the Captor farther and farther out. Sucks because so many other countries have fielded or are in the process of fielding AESA radars.
You would have thought RR will have banked this a long while ago, Its a maintenance contract on there own Engine, whoever does the work will need RR parts, unlikely 3rd party can have the expertise or the service protocols in place to do the work.