Picked from another forum site.....
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you should have watched the bbc program "weapons of mass
construction" devan
Or read the british press with below being a typical article
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Posted on 01/03/2004 4:13:31 PM PST by Pokey78
The Eurofighter is 10 years overdue, has split its design partners
and cost the British taxpayer £20bn. David Lomax reports on the
project's political dogfighting and costly mishaps
It is 10 years late, £6 billion, if not more, over budget, and the
RAF still hasn't got one in squadron service. And next month, the
Eurofighter, Britain's biggest defence procurement project, will
face a crucial export challenge.
Click to enlarge
Singapore, which needs to update its air force, will evaluate the
Eurofighter's performance against French and American rivals. An
overseas sale might offset some of the £20 billion which the
aircraft has so far cost the British taxpayer - the equivalent of
three Channel Tunnels or Railtrack's costs for the next five years
- and would be much-needed encouragement to a four-nation
collaboration which has been plagued by cost over-runs and
difficulties for two decades.
Apart from a modest purchase by Austria and orders from the
countries where the aircraft is being built, the UK, Spain, Italy
and Germany, the Eurofighter has not been sold anywhere. At the
Dubai Air Show last month, it was only present as a model while its
rivals cavorted overhead in spectacular flying displays. The RAF
was supposed to be getting 232 of them but there are still problems
with the aircraft's electronic systems and it will not be in
squadron service until 2006, and then only in the basic form of an
air-combat version, which critics claim is a relic of the Cold War
and should have been scrapped years ago.
Early in the 1980s officials from the departments of industry and
defence were concerned about the threat from the Soviet Union's new
generation of jet fighters. There were exploratory talks with
Germany, France and others about a European collaboration. John
Nott, the then Secretary of State for Defence, was lobbied to
release funds for a European fighter design contract. He had just
closed Chatham Dockyard, and was running down Portsmouth. Jobs were
going to be lost in marginal seats, so it was difficult for him to
sanction the loss of more, and as Mr Nott wrote in his
autobiography, there was "grave concern in the industry because it
was running out of work".
Another concern for government was that British Aerospace was a
promising candidate for privatisation, which eventually occurred in
1985. The company could not be left to collapse. British Aerospace
argued that the new European fighter concept ought to be allowed to
the preliminary experimental stage. If not, it predicted that BAe
would fold and the design teams disperse. Reluctantly, in 1982, Mr
Nott released £300 million for the start of design work to keep
jobs and the company's value high.
Michael Heseltine, Mr Nott's Europhile successor, grasped the
project with enthusiasm but could not accept a French proposal that
the aircraft should be based on a French design. France withdrew
and went on to design its own Rafale fighter. (A squadron is now in
service with the French navy.) In 1985 the four surviving partners
signed an agreement committing themselves to building up to 750
Eurofighters. The cost of 250 for Britain was estimated at about £7
billion. The RAF's first squadron was to have been in service by
1992.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, overturned the
strategic thinking on which the Eurofighter had been based. The
costs of German re-unification encouraged a rising chorus of
dissent within the country's parliament over the new aircraft. Why
did Germany need it? Volker Rühe, the defence minister, argued that
Germany either had to have a cheaper aircraft or pull out of the
project altogether. He had inherited MiG-29 squadrons from the old
East German Air Force, so had a cheap alternative.
The discussions to persuade Germany to return took more than two
years while design teams waited for instructions. Sir Donald
Spiers, who, as controller aircraft at the Ministry of Defence, was
managing the Eurofighter project, argued that the parties had
already spent DM15 billion on the design and asked whether they
really wanted to go back to square one. He told me that it is
impossible to work out what the German delay meant - but keeping
the design teams at the BAe factory at Warton in Lancashire added
"many, many millions" to the growing bill.
In 1992, with the Germans back on board, production restarted.
Already delayed and over-budget, the delivery of the first
Eurofighter was postponed until 2000. The numbers the RAF was due
to receive were cut from 250 to 232 - and there were further
delays. Specifications kept changing and there were constant
technical problems. The worst came from the lack of overall
management and an agreement about how the work on Eurofighter
should be divided, with each country trying to get its hands on new
technology. Not only were different parts of the Eurofighter built
in different factories in different countries, there were anomalies
stemming from the work-share agreement itself.
According to Air Marshal Sir John Walker, the former head of
defence intelligence, Britain's share of a third of the work meant
that British companies could only bid for a third. This meant that
the rest did not necessarily go to the most experienced and skilled
contractors. "Not the best way of designing an aircraft," he told
me.
The development of the flight control system was another casualty
of national rivalry. The British had already designed a system that
would have worked satisfactorily, according to Prof Ivan Yates, a
former deputy chief executive of BAe, "but the Germans wanted the
lead on the flight control system. They saw it as crucial
technology and insisted on designing their own version from scratch
- another reason for delays".
These delays were highlighted in a National Audit Office report in
1995, which put the total cost of the project to the taxpayer at
£14.5 billion and said development work was three years behind
schedule and overall equipment costs had increased by 56 per
cent.
There was worse to come. In November 2002 a Spanish Eurofighter
crashed on a test flight near Madrid. It had been flying at 45,000
feet when its engines suddenly stopped and its two-man crew was
forced to bail out. They were not hurt, but the accident meant that
the test programme was halted pending an investigation. A German
audit office report into the Eurofighter in August last year said
that the Spanish crash "was not caused by human error or the
extreme demands of a test flight . . . It appears to have been
attributed to the simultaneous firing of both afterburners, which
should have been a normal operation in a fighter aircraft. Moreover
two experienced test pilots merely activated both afterburners in
level flight. It is particularly worrying that this should have led
to a crash eight years after the first flight of the
prototype".
The German report said that only eight Eurofighters would have been
delivered to the Luftwaffe by the end of the year instead of the 15
originally promised. The performance of these aircraft was
inadequate, the report said, with significant flight restrictions.
Eurofighters were not cleared to fire their cannon or to carry
ammunition for them and, because of potential problems, had to be
operated at no more than 20 minutes' flying time from an
airfield.
The first Eurofighter Typhoons, as they are now called, are being
handed over to air forces in the four manufacturing countries. The
RAF has at last got its hands on a few machines but they are still
being tested and have merely been moved at the BAe factory in
Lancashire into a different hangar with an RAF flag outside. All
Eurofighters were grounded recently because of problems with the
landing gear and brakes. The manufacturers described these as
"teething troubles".
Even someone as close to BAe Systems (the name for British
Aerospace after it merged with GEC's Marconi Electronic Systems in
1999) as Air Chief Marshal Sir Patrick Hine, the company's former
military adviser and now consultant, admits that there is still
much work to be done. The first batch of Eurofighters will be the
air-to-air combat versions. What the RAF really needs, according to
the former head of RAF Strike Command, is the ground-attack
version, but Sir Patrick acknowledges that the engineers will still
have to integrate all the weapons systems, and the ground-attack
type will not be in squadron service until 2010 or 2014. This will
mean even higher costs "which will have to be worked out with the
MoD and RAF".
Throughout the project the MoD and British Aerospace have
emphasised the numbers of jobs the project has generated. In July
1997 the late Alan Clark MP, a former Conservative defence
minister, told the Commons in a debate about the Eurofighter that
there must be "a more efficient way of paying people to make
buckets with holes in them".
There are now similar criticisms from the former head of defence
intelligence. Air Marshal Sir John Walker says a much more
effective job-creation scheme would have been to have given £1
million each to 20,000 start-up companies.
Sue Willett, a defence analyst and long-standing critic of the
Eurofighter, sees wider implications. "The project has taken such a
big chunk of the budget that it's having a knock-on effect on all
the armed services. Spares and ammunition have been cut back," she
said to me.
"The delays and cost over-runs are demoralising for the troops and
have caused many internal procurement problems." She claims that
the project was deliberately excluded by Tony Blair from the last
Strategic Defence Review and that it is now "out of control".
Lord Heseltine still maintains that he "negotiated the biggest deal
Britain had ever done to give Britain potentially the leadership of
fighter aircraft development in Europe". But this view isn't shared
by his predecessor, who launched the Eurofighter. "It was a
terribly bad decision," Sir John Nott told me. "One of the worst
decisions I made at the MoD."
David Lomax's History of the Eurofighter is to be broadcast on BBC
Radio 4 at 8pm tomorrow.
