BAE Systems Replica and Fifth Generation Eurofighter

[Triton]

What if the BAE Systems Replica development program had continued after 1999 with Eurofighter Consortium partners EADS and Alenia Aeronautica creating a fifth-generation replacement for the Eurofighter Typhoon? A notional Eurofighter Tempest? Could France have joined the project? Perhaps Dassault joining the Eurofighter Consortium? India with the participation of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL)? Saab?

Or perhaps the nations who were denied the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, but wanted it, such as Japan and Israel?

Thoughts?

 

[SteveO]

Sounds like it would have been a political nightmare, not worth the hassle!

The plane would have looked good though B)

 

[shedofdread]

As your graphic possibly alludes, a pressing need would be to replace GR4. As SteveO points out, this has the potential to be a political and commercial nightmare (the Typhoon programme offers a glimpse into how things could go / drag out / whatever / turn out OK in the end...).

While we're in the land of speculation, here's a thought - The UK only needs partner nations in programmes such as Typhoon to share the cost so what other strategies could be employed to render Replica into a working platform and produced virtually entirely in the UK?

Perhaps goverment should place more work into the SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) arena? With lower overheads and leaner structures there's potential for cost savings there. Traditionally this hasn't happened because such businesses can be more volatile (hence wories over long-term programme support etc.) but if such work was placed with them, that volatility would be reduced and much of this concern is dealt with - catch22 and all that...

 

[danielgrimes]

How does the Typhoon compare with the Rafael from a capability/£ perspective? My hunch is that if Franch can afford to independently develop military technology, surely Britain and Germany can? Are the Panavia/Eurodighter alliances about money, NATO interoperability or some vein of geo-politics?

 

[Hobbes]

Perhaps goverment should place more work into the SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) arena? With lower overheads and leaner structures there's potential for cost savings there. Traditionally this hasn't happened because such businesses can be more volatile

Smaller businesses usually aren't geared up for military-grade work. I don't mean the technology, but the legal and administrative side. Quality records, hell, records for everything. Export control. Support requirements for decades after delivery. Having seen a few defence programs up close, many businesses would shit a brick if they saw all of the requirements a seemingly simple delivery entails. You'd need to create a framework to handle this.

 

[GTX]

Perhaps goverment should place more work into the SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) arena? With lower overheads and leaner structures there's potential for cost savings there. Traditionally this hasn't happened because such businesses can be more volatile

Smaller businesses usually aren't geared up for military-grade work. I don't mean the technology, but the legal and administrative side. Quality records, hell, records for everything. Export control. Support requirements for decades after delivery. Having seen a few defence programs up close, many businesses would shit a brick if they saw all of the requirements a seemingly simple delivery entails. You'd need to create a framework to handle this.

Agreed.

 

[Matej]

My hunch is that if French can afford to independently develop military technology, surely Britain and Germany can?

Germany can, but will never do. Last time there was a political and general public will to develop domestic military fighter was mid 70s. Just look at the equipment/capabilities of the German and British Eurofighters and you will see, what it is about.

In a general tone, what Eurofighter or Rafale doesn't have that is required by its operators? Stealth? What for? Both planes are already ideal for a bigger/rich European countries - true multirole with a big weapons load optimised for air defense and at relatively affordable costs (compared to F-22). So periodical upgrades (Meteors with Pirate) combined with some new serial produced UCAV will do the job for at least next 30 years. No need for... marketing term "5th generation".

 

[danielgrimes]

Stealth? What for? Both planes are already ideal for a bigger/rich European countries - true multirole with a big weapons load optimised for air defense and at relatively affordable costs (compared to F-22). So periodical upgrades (Meteors with Pirate) combined with some new serial produced UCAV will do the job for at least next 30 years. No need for... marketing term "5th generation".

I do agree. Once the UCAVs, Storm Shadows and Tomahawks have complete the SEAD missions, it seams that low observability has reduced benefits.

 

[DWG]

Perhaps goverment should place more work into the SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) arena? With lower overheads and leaner structures there's potential for cost savings there. Traditionally this hasn't happened because such businesses can be more volatile

Smaller businesses usually aren't geared up for military-grade work. I don't mean the technology, but the legal and administrative side. Quality records, hell, records for everything.

Just to add a little real-world perspective to this, at one point I had four people working for me full time, and up to 20 immediately prior to deliveries, solely to ensure we had closed all of the open change records, and that was just on the software for the Typhoon Flight Control System, not the full aircraft - there was a larger team to do the testing, our job was simply to make sure that all of the files that needed changing, and only those files, had been a) changed and b) tested. That might sound trivial, but change records could run 150 pages plus, mostly listing affected files, IIRC we were generating significantly over 100,000 files/year. The FCS development team on its own ran 100+ engineers at Rochester, and at least 20 more at Ottobrunn. That's not counting our QA, customer QA, national level QA, production staff, tech writers, and so on. So we're talking a couple of man centuries of effort a year, just on one sub-system. One of my colleagues had been working on the FCS since he was an apprentice (back in the EAP days), and was in his 40s when the project ran down, never having worked on anything else - how many other development projects deal in man-millennia of effort?


Considered opinion from some of my colleagues was that the only system out there that might exceed our level of criticality was the FCS on the space shuttle


As part of doing what we did, we were assessed at CMM Level 4, the highest level of competence in software engineering organisations, and at the level you have processes on how to write processes (I know, I wrote some of them <g>). It's really not a level of process that most SMEs are equipped to cater for, for many of them simply having a procedure to do something would be a major step forward (I remember a friend coming back from a job interview with an SME absolutely horrified at their lack of process, and this was an SME doing safety critical work, fortunately their idea of real-time, safety-critical was needing to deal with an error within 20 minutes, not the fractions of a second we dealt with).

 

[DWG]

What if the BAE Systems Replica development program had continued after 1999 with Eurofighter Consortium partners EADS and Alenia Aeronautica creating a fifth-generation replacement for the Eurofighter Typhoon? A notional Eurofighter Tempest?

Essentially you're talking about FOAS - the Future Offensive Aircraft System, but that was to be a Tornado replacement rather than an air superiority aircraft. There's more call for stealth for a penetrating bomber, rather than an air dominance fighter. Consider the relative costs of F-22 and Typhoon, F-22 $412m/aircraft (GAO figure 2012), Typhoon runs about a third that (latest German order was about 90m Euros/aircraft, but that excludes development costs): which is more useful, 1 F-22, or 3 Typhoons?

 

[DWG]

this has the potential to be a political and commercial nightmare (the Typhoon programme offers a glimpse into how things could go / drag out / whatever / turn out OK in the end...).

The major problems for Typhoon came out of the end of the Cold War; without the loss of the critical need for the Typhoon, Volker Rühe (German Defence Minister) wouldn't have bet his political future on either killing Eurofighter entirely, or gutting it (dropping an engine in the middle of development - come on!). The scale of the German defence cuts since reunification are incredible, the Heer has dropped from 12 active divisions (and several divisions-worth of reserves), to 5, and will shortly have only 2; that scale of cuts inevitably placed huge pressure on the size of the Eurofighter buy, and the funding available for further development, and if the German cuts are the biggest, then they also provide the argument for similar cuts in the British, Spanish and Italian buys. The Typhoon development programme actually ran pretty smoothly in comparison to the F-22 or Gripen.


The end of the Cold War was an unpredictable event that completely altered the market forecast for the Typhoon, a contemporary programme would hopefully face a steadier market, but also a smaller one that casts major questions over the commercial viability of the project. A major problem for the financial viability of the programme would be the existence of the F-35 as a direct competitor.

 

[DWG]

How does the Typhoon compare with the Rafael from a capability/£ perspective? My hunch is that if Franch can afford to independently develop military technology, surely Britain and Germany can?

It's not so much a question of ability to afford the project, so much as it is having the political will to take on that level of expenditure. The expenditure levels are easier to tolerate if they are shared. France had a slightly different perspective to the other Eurofighter partners, Dassault have historically been poor at playing with other companies and reputedly wanted design leadership across the board - ie in every aspect of the project: aerodynamics, FCS, systems, radar, engines; the UK as France's technological peer expected a share in the design leadership, meanwhile Germany, Italy and Spain wanted to leverage the development process to increase their national technical abilities, which in Germany's case would mean them taking leadership in at least one area - they were particularly keen to take on the FCS. The difference between what France envisaged for Eurofighter, what the other partner nations envisaged, and what each nation envisaged for the project and design leadership, combined with Dassault's desire to remain a fully independent national champion, and the French government's willingness to back them in that, provided the excuse for France to leave the Eurofighter project and undertake a solo project, and for everyone else to breath a sigh of relief when they were gone.