The Special Report

Is it a plane? No it is a flying vegetable

Eurofighter could, and should, have been a shining example of pan-European co-operation. One in the eye for Uncle Sam. The greatest ground attack "mud mover" the world had ever seen. But instead it will stand for ever more as a beacon, showing the world that a federal superstate can never work on this side of the Atlantic.

The idea for such a plane was first hatched back in the early 1970s when Britain realised it would soon need a land-based fighter bomber to replace both the Jaguar and the Harrier. We couldn't design such a machine by ourselves because we were on a three-day week at the time, so we went to see the French and the Germans.

The French said they already had a fighter, the Mirage, and therefore only needed a bomber which could be used on aircraft carriers. The Germans said they didn't need a bomber since, for once, they weren't planning on bombing anyone. They needed a fighter. And they absolutely were not interested in this aircraft carrier business because they didn't have any.

Obviously the whole thing was never going to work, so in the spirit of what was to come the three countries did the sensible thing, signed a deal and went back home to come up with some preliminary studies.

Now, to understand the hopelessness of the position I would like you to imagine that they were not designing a warplane but a vegetable. So Britain came up with the potato, France designed a stick of celery, and Germany did a lobster thermidor. The project was dead.

But not for long. From nowhere, the Italians and Spanish suddenly decided that they wanted a piece of the action and, flushed with the idea of these extra complications, a new contract was drawn up.

It was ever so straightforward. The amount of work, and therefore jobs, given to each country would depend on how many of the fighters they would buy. That was fair. But not to the French it wasn't. They wanted one plane, 50% of all the work and total control, and when they were told to get lost, they did. Taking Spain with them.

So now it was Britain, Germany and Italy and it stayed that way for about 12 seconds, when the Spanish fell out with the French and asked to come back in again. So, 15 years after the project was first mooted and just 18 months before the RAF needed its planes, the project at last was up and running.

Then disaster. The Berlin Wall fell over and all of a sudden European governments lost the will to spend trillions on a plane that would have nobody to fight. The air forces, too, realised that a highly manoeuvrable, Mach 2, dogfighting jet would have no place in the new world order. So it was agreed by everyone to keep going.

Germany and Britain were going to take 250 Eurofighters each, which is why we each had 33% of the workload. But in the recession of 1992 our governments wondered if this was a trifle excessive. The RAF dropped its order to 232 planes and the Luftwaffe to just 140. But the German government insisted that it kept its share of the work. When everyone else kicked up a fuss, it threatened to pull out.

Fearful that the pack of cards was about to come tumbling down, the Italians and Spanish went to lunch and the British got tough. Immediately, we gave in to the Germans.

However, the delay had thrown up a new problem: the name. All along it had been called Eurofighter 2000, but by 1994 it was obvious that it could never be operational until 2001 at the earliest. So it became the Typhoon, which conjures up pictures of devastation and death.

Well, don't get your hopes up. You see, Tony Blair recently decided that the plane's missiles should be British rather than American. Good call, but the British weaponry won't be available until eight years after the jet goes into service. So what are the pilots supposed to do in the mean time: make rude gestures? That said, though, I have talked to various authoritative sources over the past year and it is widely thought that Eurofighter will become the world's best fighter-bomber. It is desperately easy to fly and at £50m a pop it is also extremely cheap. To put that in perspective, each new USAF F-22 Raptor will cost £115m.

So Eurofighter is something about which Europe can be justifiably proud. Should the Russians ever decide to invade, we will have exactly the right sort of fire power to hold them back.

However, for dealing with sundry world leaders in far-flung parts of the globe, what you really need are aircraft carriers. Britain has just ordered two and there was talk of modifying Eurofighter to become precisely what the French wanted 30 years ago. But presumably it was too much of an effort. So what have we done? Well, in a perfect spirit of European co-operation, we have teamed up with the Americans to build something called the Joint Strike Fighter. Thank you, Europe, and goodnight.

-The Sunday Times, London

Inside the glass house

Editorial/ Opinion Contents