Ah, the infamous Italian Eurofighter “F-16 killer”. The problem with your question is that the pilot obviously did his homework in piloting, but not so well in geography when he was at school. The turkish crescent is horizontal. The pakistani crescent is inclinated but upwards, not downwards. So in his artistic attempt, he messed up the flags of both of them…

Such markings are usually applied by the maintenance crew not by the pilot himself. And there is a difference between geography and messing up a flag of a country.;)

Wrt the “PAF” encounter I asked myself the very question Yudhishtir has put forward. That guy says “we” and if he was an exchange pilot you wonder whether a whole TuAF sqn is made up of Pakistani exchange pilots. That the RAF jocks were “shocked” would just confirm the point that F-16s rarely score kills at all against Typhoons or that they were simply surprised by the skills of the Pakistani(s?). Occasional kills occur, but that doesn’t mean that aircraft A is automatically superior to aircraft B. Thus far everything points to the other direction including Vipen jocks admiring Typhoon’s performance. And better don’t ask the Viper jocks from the BAF, RNLAD and USAFE who recently measured up against GAF Typhoons.;)

It would be much wiser to use the extra range to avoid the enemy fighters altogether, and either try to go undetected

Impossible as we all know as only the Rafale is a stealthy upper super plane with Spectra cloaking device (why does it need it anyway?). You know Typhoon has such a big RCS and crappy ECM it can’t hide so it must fight its way through the defences.:p

Sorry couldn’t resist.

On a more particular note wrt the TGP the centreline position was the easiest way to integrate the pod quickly. There were/are concerns wrt the FoV of the pod if loaded to a forward fuselage station and of course it is not wise to trade range for one missile. I somewhat doubt we’ll ever see an LDP attached to the front fuselage station as it was previously planned, even Eurofighter adapted its graphics and the conformally carried LDP is gone.

@toan,
no Typhoon can’t carry heavy stores plus wing tanks.

In general could we get over this now?:mad:

EEL
There is a recce version of the Litening dubbed Recce Lite. This pod is an option and is in fact considered by the Luftwaffe. The Recce Lite has been demonstrated in Switzerland in November 2008.

@EEL,
we’ll unfortunately not see such paint jobs on the Typhoon as neither of the Luftwaffe units converting to the type is a tiger squadron.:(

Wrt the engines 15% more thrust is what the current EJ200 are capable of by programming the DECU software accordingly, albeit at the expense of life time. Eurojet has suggested a two-staged approach to boost thrust while at least retaining current engine life time. In a first stage the thrust would have been increased by 20% and in a second one by 30%. This is old news however and there haven’t been any more recent information at all. I personally don’t expect to see stronger engines at all. But as you I think that the current thrust is sufficient for the time to come.