Well, the most important thing is to get the user community up so that it gains more and more credibility and gains more and more exports. If this can be achieved by a mix of used and new aircraft then so be it, such a measure doesn’t reduce overall numbers and might actually increase numbers if the partner nations reorder at some point in time. The user group is now 6 nations with 707 aircraft on order, if Eurofighter can get this to 10 and 707 aircraft within the next 5 years that would still be better than the previous situation. However 10 nations and 800+ aircraft would be even better. 🙂 Currently the best export prospects are Oman, Greece, Switzerland, Romania, Japan and India in my opinion.

India has been offered a place in the consortium

Link.
EADS offers India place in the consortium

It is more or less the same deal. UK get the outdated tornados back and replace them by shinny typhoons. The planes are just the tiny visible part of this enormous defence deal started 23 years ago thanks to enormous briberies.

This is incorrect, the Typhoons will not replace the Tornado GR1s. The Typhoons will replace F5s and Tornado F3s apparently. The Tornado GR1s are undergoing a large upgrade to bring them to a GR4esque standard. Development aircraft are regularly flying out of BAE Warton.

As for BAE’s presence in Saudi-Arabia, it is huge, over 5000 employees working on and partly flying Hawks, Tornados and PC9s. There are also BAE armoured vehicles and British (VT Group) ships in the Saudi inventory. Al-Yamamah has been worth 43 billion pounds to the UK, Al-Salam will hopefully bring the same amount of money to UK industry.

As for “briberies”, if I were you I would be careful to claim this, no one has proven this and from what I understand concerning this deal BAE Systems never used any of it’s own money, it rather got money from Saudi A to pay Saudi B.

The UK is saying they are confident it will go through, but yes in the unlikely case of it not being approved we should break off most industrial ties with the US in defence terms. Not only the UK but the whole of Europe.

The Indians haven’t ordered them yet officially, but it’s expected some time soon, probably still in 2008.

I would have thought 180 T45Ds which would be an improvement on the T45C Goshawk. All Goshawk, pretty certainly.

Edit: Actually the article does say “180 more Goshawks”, so all carrier based and produced by BAE (rear fuselage, centre fuselage, wings and air intakes) and Boeing (final assembly and cockpit.).

Germany
United Kingdom
Spain
Italy
Austria
Saudi-Arabia (en route to Singapore)
USA
Singapore
Czech Republic (RAF deployment)
Finland (RAF deployment)
Norway
Switzerland
Cyprus
UAE
Greece
Netherlands
Sri Lanka
Belgium
France

When did it go to France (Le Bourget?) and especially Belgium?