Page 12 - RAF Lossiemouth Special Report

Visiting RAF Lossiemouth: The RAF Shapes a Way Ahead

We instill in the guys that we train to always think about Control of the Air.

FIGURE 3 A TYPHOON INTERCEPTING A RUSSIAN AIRCRAFT. CREDIT: RAF

Question: I would like to turn to your experience with Typhoon.

The recent trilateral exercise at Langley brought together two airplanes which now have 10 years of
operations under their belt along with Rafale which is a bit older, but the point is that it takes time to get
the full combat capability out of a combat jet.

How do you view Typhoon at 10?

IIOC (AC) Sqn: I’ve been lucky to fly the airplane for all 10 of those years.

It is fantastically rewarding and satisfying but it has taken those 10 years to get there!

It will take another 10 years to bring in all of the other new equipment that we’re looking forward to
incorporating into the jet.

I do think that the British are driving the equipment program because the British have the greatest political
imperative to make it work of any nation in the consortium.

We like to think we bring performance in terms of fighter-to-fighter against a Russian threat.

We bring performance and we bring deterrence.

Those are the two things that we bring.

It’s a large aircraft in the F-15 class so we have endurance and a large payload.

Combine that with our performance and we bring a lot to the fight.

What we also bring is that we are different to the F-series fighters.

Having a fourth-fifth gen force mix allows plenty of scope for innovation and great tactical benefit.

We have different sensors and capabilities to the F-jets, as does Rafale, so any potential adversary would
have to defeat a number of networked sensors.

Second Line of Defense

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