Forum: Modern Military Aircraft

According to the linked PPRUNE thread AVM Bagwell has said that T1 Typhoons will be approaching obsolescence by 2015 after just 8 years in service and will be scrapped thus reducing the RAF Typhoon fleet to just 92 aircraft. This is pretty horrendous news to myself and i'd imagine other British folk will feel likewise.

By this the RAF will possibly end up with more F-35' than Typhoons too.

Here is the link to the thread it was discussed in but the interview it was sourced from in the Sunday Times is subscription only and i'm not jumping in my car at this hour to try and get a paper from the newsagent here. Apparently its also on Av Week to but i'm blowed if I can find it. (its probably starring me in the face ther but hey its not my fault i'm blind)

http://www.pprune.org/military-aircrew/ ... 015-a.html

I'll be hawking the PPRUNE thread to find out more but does anyone else here know any more on this?

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This has been on the cards for a long time, most likely selling the Tranche 1's to Oman and using the sales to help fund a full Tranche 3 purchase.

Andy

If they aren't classified as 'obsolete' then they probably have cold war era laws blocking their sale.

I wouldn't have thought there were any restrictions or laws preventing the sale if the Typhoons were classed as obsolete or not. They have no nuclear capability and futhermore its never stopped the UK selling/bribing middle eastern countries into buying thier brand new or second hand weapon systems before.

(Looks like I was wrong on us ending up with mroe F-35's than Typhoons though which boff180 kindly pointed out to me in another thread)

I don't think the RAF will scrap these aircraft. Certain components, the computers in particular are obsolete and as they are out of production for some time now, it will be difficult to sustain the aircraft without a computer upgrade. It's certainly possible, whether the RAF will go that root remains yet to be seen, but I somehow doubt that any aircraft will be scrapped anytime soon.

Hmmm, I don't know, it does seem to soon to scrap or sell them by 2015 but apparently he (AVM Bagwell) said that "the jet would become prohibitive for us to operate and too expensive to modify" according to a chap on PPRUNE who seems to have read the piece in question. I think Boff180 has it right and they'll be flogged off to Oman.
It'll be interesting to see how it all unfolds over the coming years.

Well if they can sell the T1s (or some of them) to Oman and purchase T3B instead it would be a positive development for the RAF. Better than rejecting T3B and keep the T1 examples going. It has been stated that upgrading the T1 aircraft and failing to secure T3A including the associated cost savings due reduced operational costs would have been almost as expensive as buying the full T3. I could imagine that this is what's being referred too, though this is not exactly news and pre-dates the T3A contract. Might be worth noting that this was meant to include T3A and B. IIRC the projected cost for upgrading the T1 examples, plus the 900 mln looses of operational cost savings would have meant some ~5-6 bln, vs. 7 bln for buying the complete T3 run including the projected operational cost savings.

I don't think we'd be buying any T3 Typhoons to replace the T1's being dumped or sold off. Some chap on PPRUNE said "HMG Has washed Its hands of this out dated product. Even my friends in the RAF think its yesterdays news." which hardly sounds promising and besides I doubt we could afford to buy anymore what with the F-35 program, oh that and throwing away billions in foreign aid to ungrateful basket case countries.

The Guardian has a story on it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/1 ... e-1bn-cuts

Quote:

It has also emerged that the RAF is to scrap more than 50 Eurofighter/Typhoon jets which became operational only three years ago at a cost of more than £4.5bn because it cannot afford to update them.

Oh my, 50 Typhoons? I didn't imagine the number would be so great.
I can't just believe how we in the UK have shafted our own armed services in favour of giving foreign aid to all and sundry and now we find we're another billion or two short ontop of the previous finacial problems! We must be the dumbest nation on the planet by a good margin, we might as well disband the RAF at this rate as it won't exist in 15 years if we keep this idiocy up.

I'm so ashamed to be British right now.

Well that's about the entire T1 fleet as has been suggested. If it makes you feel better the situation isn't much better in other European countries either. Spent the money on the whole world, rescue failed states etc. At the same time politicians tell us we must save more money and must accept ever growing taxes and what not. "Oh we have a state dept, sorry folk but you must pay more". "Oh EU member X is close to collapsing lets pump in some billions (from where ever)".

That's the problem of the euro. Failed welfare x goes down, everyone else's money becomes worthless.

Its not just the Euro, the fact is the UK throws away 8 billion a year in foreign aid, mainly to Africa and Asia but some goes to India. Absolutely idiotic considering the financial situation and we are in deep water because of it, especially our armed services. We've effectively sacrificed are armed forces for a bunch of folk who can't be helped and are ungrateful to boot.

Excuse my ignorance as I'm not all that familiar with the Typhoon or it's operation(s), but why is your Maj Gen (AVM) Bagwell saying the older T1 Typhoons would be prohibitively too costly at least to operate?

Assuming they're not optimized for combat operations compared to later blocks, why can't the RAF use them in other roles such as trainers to make them viable?

shep1978 wrote:

We must be the dumbest nation on the planet by a good margin

No you're not.

shep1978 wrote:

I'm so ashamed to be British right now.

Don't be.

Scorpion1alpha wrote:

Excuse my ignorance as I'm not all that familiar with the Typhoon or it's operation(s), but why is your Maj Gen (AVM) Bagwell saying the older T1 Typhoons would be prohibitively too costly at least to operate?

Assuming they're not optimized for combat operations compared to later blocks, why can't the RAF use them in other roles such as trainers to make them viable?

I think the point here is that T1 aircraft feature some obsolete components, particularly processors which aren't in production anymore. This could turn out to be a problem for maintaining the aircraft, while upgrading them with a new computer system would be costly. T1 aircraft are or at least will be fully combat capable.
Maybe the General is just exaggerating to find a reason for the cuts.

Forum: Modern Military Aircraft

RAF to ditch Some Typhoons from 2015???