Moving the programme to the production-investment phaseAs 1997 drew to a close, the four Eurofighter nations were at last preparing to give the green light for the programme to move on to the next phase of production investment.
The decision, when it came at the start of this year, finally cleared away the politics which had dogged and delayed the programme over the past few years. Now it is up to the industrial partners, British Aerospace, Daimler-Benz Aerospace, Italy's Alenia and CASA of Spain, to deliver what is shaping up to be a highly impressive programme in the view of this year's panel of Awards judges. The multi-role, high agility Eurofighter has already proved its worth during the development and flight test phase. By the end of last year, the seven prototype aircraft had carried out over 500 flights at the four European test centres.
The airframe has reached maturity with all static strength testing complete and fatigue life testing more than 80% of the way to the final 18,000h target. Production of this phase is well advanced. Aerodynamically the aircraft has met, or even exceeded, expectations, and the goal of carefree handling has been met.
Integration of the new Eurojet EJ200 engine is described as "remarkably smooth" throughout the flight development programme, with pre-production engines showing 100% performance on testbed trials.
Work on the sophisticated avionics and cockpit systems is nearing completion. Initial flight trials of the ECR90 radar have also demonstrated most of the operational modes and met all trial objectives. The fact that the programme has progressed as strongly as it has, is itself an achievement, given the inherent difficulties of managing a project across four countries with different cultures and languages.
Source: Flight International