I am shocked and appalled to read that the number of RAF fighters is to drop to an all time low, not least because part of the fleet being retired is the first tranche of Euro-fighter Typhoon jets.... Now, I have a long history with the Euro-fighter, I actually "flew" it in 1994, that is I played the EF2000 Simulator on my Pentium 60Mhz PC at the time... And we expected this amazing new jet to enter service soon...
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But soon was almost a joke, the first jets only reached RAF hands on the 9th August 2007... Just look at those dates again... 1994 to 2007... That's eleven years... Eleven years from a simulated touted version, it was for a long time meant to be the new fighter for the RAF to take them into the new millennium, it was the Euro-fighter 2000, then the Euro-fighter Typhoon 2000, and then when the calendar over marched progress on production it became just the Typhoon... And still even more years before it was in squadron hands.
Before the computer game, the real aircraft had finally taken it's first flight just a couple of years before in 1994, but it had been touted as in design for a decade at least by then already! I'd seen news of it at Farnborough for year upon year, but that plane never wanted to appear.
What's this got to do with today's cuts in 2015?... Well, they're retiring 53 of the first tranche of Typhoons... So those planes delivered in just 2007... That's about the same age as my car... This is a total disgrace! Just shy of twelve years service, and they're binning them, we don't have dry deserts in which to moth ball aircraft, we don't have hermetically sealed hangars, so these planes are going to be dumped, scrapped, destroyed.
We already lost our fast-jet fleet ability pending the even more delayed F35B, and now we're throwing away Typhoons!
This is senseless... Ridiculous, and perilous with Russian aircraft buzzing our borders!
BBC Story (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33618484)
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