STEWART PENNEY / LONDON
Eurofighter has opened the International Weapons System Support Centre (IWSSC),which will be the centre of industrial support for the Typhoon multirole fighter.
The IWSSC will link industry, through the Eurofighter and Eurojet consortia, with the German, Italian, Spanish and UK air forces. Export customers will be invited to join the system.
IWSSC is expected to reduce development cycles for future upgrades, as well as making it possible to develop common solutions to in-service problems. A key role of the IWSSC will be to co-ordinate upgrades and maintain a configuration control database.
A problem with the Panavia Tornado has been that the German, Italian and UK air forces' aircraft are not to a common standard, which in turn has increased the cost and complexity of upgrades and support.
The IWSSC will be aided by a national support centre (NSC) in each country, says Massimo Tarantola, Eurofighter support phase programme director.
Urgent problems will be solved by the NSCs, and considered for inclusion in the baseline Typhoon specification. Wider implementation of the change will be overseen by the IWSSC.
Tarantola expects the contract for the NSCs and related infrastructure to be signed by the middle of this year, which will allow the Typhoon to be supported at service entry. The latest planned in-service date is 30 June, 12 months later than planned.
Initially, NSCs will have only basic support capabilities, such as query answering. The UK NSC will be the first with full capability, due in October 2005, with Spain following at the end of that year. Germany and Italy's NSCs will be fully operational by December 2006.
Meanwhile, Eurofighter will this week open the joint integration facility for the Aircrew Synthetic Training Aids programme at EADS's Manching, southern Germany, factory.
Tarantola says two domes for full mission simulators, as well as the hardware for the first cockpit trainer, are in place ready for integration with the software.
Source: Flight International
