Am I right in thinking their are some structural differences between Tranche 1 and Tranche 2? If so, if the RAF keep their Tranche 1 Typhoons, would they be re-manufactured when they undergo a mid-life upgrade so that structurally they are identical to Tranche 2? Hopefully this is not a dumb question!

It did not work well, but not for the tired old prejudiced ‘wicked crab’/’heroic jack tar’ reasons that you trot out.

It didn’t work well:

Because the Navy could not hold to its end of the bargain and was unable to man its ‘half’ of an organisation that had been 3/4 RAF before it went joint.

Not advocating CATOBAR carriers as Liger is, but I seen this argument (about failures with JFH) thrashed out on PPRUNE Military before and the counter-argument was that the problem was that RAF required the FAA stand up a force structure identical to the RAF, which had more senior officers than what the FAA normally operated, which is why they could not man 50:50.

I have also understood from the comments on PPRUNE that there is a single training pipeline for fast jet pilots (hope I got that right) – there was a circular argument, which if I understood it correctly, was that the RAF refused to give the FAA enough training slots as the RAF felt that many of the candidates propose by the FAA did not meet (the RAF’s?) standards, which eventually resulted in the RAF complaining that there were not enough trained FAA pilots.

I’m not ex-forces, and lack any first hand knowledge of what happened but I strongly suspect that both Liger’s and your arguments are gross simplifications of what really happened, and both arguments are coloured by rose tinted glasses – Liger has a well known love of the RN and if you are who I think you are, you have a well known admiration of the RAF.

Thus the RAF STOVL bias which does put your point of of view into perspective.

Isn’t Jonesy ex-RN? I thought he was some sort of missile tech?

I guess the low(er) cost options would be either conformal tanks and/or an improved version of Storm Shadow, over a “large wing” Typhoon.

There are rumours of a split buy floating around of F-35B and F-35C (which up to now I discounted due to the cost issues of running two different types) but you do have to wonder if the RAF are pushing a split buy with a mix of FAA/RAF squadrons operating a moderate number of F-35B’s and then F-35C as Tornado replacement as way of the RAF getting their cake and eating it – marginalise the FAA, minimise the amount of time RAF pilots need to be on the carrier and preserve the RAF’s ability to provide deep strike.

Is there any margin in a “big wing” version of the typhoon as a replacement for the tornado? How much would the necessary structural changes and the associated changes to the FBW cost? Edit: by big wing typhoon I mean a typhoon with larger wings optimised as a bomb truck and not a naval typhoon

I doubt you will, since the European Union has been slowly trying to do that to the UK for quite some years, and you’ve not moved country yet :rolleyes:

I’m half Spanish, so I have a higher tolerance level to Europeanisation of the UK than I do to US culture creeping in… don’t get me started on the fact that Halloween now means loads of kid’s knocking on the door or people call their phones cellphones and not mobiles as the Queen intend the devices to be called!

I have been to both Germany and the US for business and I was understood about as equally well in both countries, but Germany felt closer to UK culturally than my visit to South Carolina did!

But all parties have to be allowed to submit again or it will go to the courts.

Was going to keep out of this, but I happen to agree with Madrat, if only Dassault is allowed to make revised offer, Eurofighter will go to the courts and get the whole competition opened again, as lets not forget Eurofighter scored higher than Gripen as well.

Of course I have little faith in the leaked technical reports as the sections that are missing are the bits that show what configuration was tested, what assurances they got of future developments, how they rated the risk of those future developments (for example if I had been the Swiss I would have rated the chance of the Typhoon getting AESA radar at 0% in 2009) and the full methodology and definitions used so that we can sure that when the Swiss talk about a certain parameter it means the same thing as we think it does.

I am also doubtful that the Swiss have more demanding performance requirements than India, India said that both the Typhoon and Rafale met all their technical requirements while on Rafale met all of the Swiss requirements.

Actually, thinking about it some more I can see one area where maybe the Swiss and India requirements would be different – A2A – I can imagine that A2A scenarios used by the India’s and the Swiss had different ROE’s. I suspect that SPECTRA and IRST of the Rafale tipped the balance as in positively identifying a contact at the extreme edge of WVR for the Swiss, while India in a war scenario is going to want to get early lock and early kill’s and I would not be surprise if there is not much difference in the range at which a Typhoon and Rafale can successfully engage an enemy aircraft once they both have Meteor in comparison to the known Pakistani and Chinese fighters.

Still it does not say how Typhoon could meet Indian requirements for A2G but fail Swiss requirements, because lets face it India is much more likely to need A2G capabilities than Switzerland.

Wow, really? Sounds very much like a wish list, a pie in the sky one at that.

While I agree that the poster on PRRUNE Military was likely wishing out loud, I do wonder if there is something to his logic (though I doubt very much we will ever operate tilt rotor aircraft as they cost a fortune to operate).

I would imagine that by the end the decade we would be looking at an additional helicopter purchase, simply because successive Governments have ensured that Westland’s and now AugustaWestland have a fairly steady stream of work, and once the Wildcat programme is completed and they have navalised and upgrade Merlin’s the only thing on the horizon is support and training contracts.

Still the AW149 is a rather illogical choice as unless agreement was found the work would be carried out in Italy and therefore provides little benefit to Yeovil.