The first Eurofighter Typhoon of the so-called Tranche 3 standard, has started its flight tests at BAE Warton, UK.
Tranche 3 is the latest version of the Typhoon which embedded hundreds of modifications to make the combat plane more attractive to current and potential export customers.
Even if little has changed from an aesthetic point of view, the aircraft has a number of small panels on the fuselage that are there to accomodate the fitting of CFT (Conformal Fuel Tanks).
A new internal structure in the nose secion was designed to accomodate wirings, power, cooling and electronics for the new E-Scan radar.
Next-gen Typhoon features Hi-speed Data Networking capabilities, Fibre optics weapons bus and more computing power.
The first Tranche 3 has been produced for the RAF by the Eurofighter consortium and assembled by BAE Systems.
Under the Tranche 3A contract signed back in 2009, a total of 112 aircraft have been ordered by Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, with 40 examples for Royal Air Force.
The 400th Eurofighter Typhoon was delivered to the German Air Force during a special ceremony held at Cassidian’s Military Air Systems Center in Manching, Southern Germany, on Dec. 4, 2013.
Image credit: BAE Systems
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Can’t read BAE graphic text…
Right click on the image and “view image” or simply download it, to have it full size.
It should be noted that in my web browser the pic of the euro fighter from the home page looks a little weird.
Still a cool article and the pic in the article does not have that distortion.
Weird rendering, I can’t see any problem here.
The shame is it’s still a 2nd tier airframe that a F-16 out performs.
When will it go up against an F-16? …. so no problem then
“When time comes for air dominance, however, some other ingredients like thrust to weight ratio and wing loading tend to regulate the sky. And in that, only an F-22, which has very similar values, comes close to a dogfighter like the Eurofighter Typhoon.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/david-cenciotti-the-f-35-fleet-will-be-irrelevant-2014-2
So will it have AESA radar finally? Are they keeping the pulse Doppler? Will it have any TVC?