With the UK Royal Air Force banking on success of the Tempest programme to fulfil much of its defence aerospace requirements for the second half of the century, where might this platform fit in the fleet of 2040 and beyond? Samuel Beal looks into the potential line of battle.
Billed in the mid-1980s as a state-of-the-art fighter capable of outmanoeuvring the nimblest of Soviet MiGs all the while matching American technological prowess, the consortium behind Eurofighter set itself a daunting industrial and engineering challenge. Yet bristling with the latest in high-tech wizardry and software, Eurofighter’s staunchest supporters considered the aircraft as akin to possessing ‘tomorrow’s fighter today’.
That initial fanfare proved premature. By the time it reached operational capability in 2003, a common jibe lobbed from across the Atlantic smarted that the Eurofighter, far from heralding the future, now amounted to ‘yesterday’s fighter today’. But the saga of the Eurofighter could yet yield important lessons for one of its original backers: the Royal Air Force (RAF), once again in the throes of a mammoth, multinational procurement project for a new fighter.
In 2018 Gavin Williamson, then-Secretary of De…
