BONN — The German Air Force is pushing ahead with an upgrade of its Panavia Tornadoes even though a plan to nearly halve the fleet is being significantly speeded up.
The company leading the upgrade effort, EADS’s defense and security subsidiary, Cassidian, said its first production aircraft with the new capability standard ASSTA 3.0 (Avionics System Software Tornado Ada) performed its maiden flight from its Manching site last month.
If the testing runs as scheduled, delivery of the first upgraded Tornado to the German Air Force is planned for mid-2012, said Germany’s biggest defense contractor. The Air Force expects the outfitting of all planes to be finished by mid-2015.
The testing milestone comes in the wake of the country’s military restructuring effort, which includes a cut in the number of Tornado fighter jets from 185 to 85 planes. That process has been sped up and is supposed to be finished by the end of this year.
The remaining aircraft get the technical upgrade, which could keep them multirole combat-ready beyond 2025.
I am surprised — why are they doing this? Would it not make more sense to invest in the Typhoon? If not, why not?
It tends to be cheaper to operate one a/c than two, and the sooner they can phase out the Tornado and focus on one (multirole) Typhoon, the better? At least that’s what sounds sensible to me.
Unless of course, updating and keeping those Tornadoes are cheaper than making the Typhoon multirole…?
Or am I missing something else here? Hopefully somebody can clarify this mystery!
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March 13, 2012 at 6:12 pm