Eurofighter - Typhoon Fighter Aircraft

[Music] on this the eve of the 1992 farra Air Show Europe's Air Forces and governments are locked in a heated debate a conceptual dog fight over the future of this aircraft it won't be flying at the show however since although accurate in every detail the aircraft this pilot is sitting in is only a wooden model of a plane that has yet to take to the air a model of a 21st century Spitfire known to the four nations who are building it as the European fighter aircraft or Euro Fighter at the British Aerospace Factory in Warton just outside Blackpool the second of seven flying prototypes is nearing completion like some hugely complex plastic kit the sections being assembled here have come from all over Europe Europe the tail and the center fuselage were built in Germany part of the rear fuselage was built in Spain while another part was built in Italy Italy also built the left wing but not the right that was British aerospace's job along with the forward fuselage and nose amazingly it is all knitting seamlessly together and the engineers here are confident that it will soon take the place of its wooden double on the runway threshold and will fly Before Christmas it has taken nearly 10 years of development and over 5 billion pounds to get this far and still the Euro Fighter is fully 7 years away from entering Squadron service but even as the last few systems are being fitted onto the British prototype by specialist technicians drawn from each of the partner countries the Euro Fighter is already running into unforeseen turbulence political turbulence of the original four Nation requirement for 765 aircraft both the RAF and the German LT buffer said that they each wanted 250 earlier this summer however Germany's politicians declared their intention to pull out of the project once the development phase was over in 1999 at a stroke the decision has put 20,000 jobs in Germany's Aerospace industry and Jeopardy and could still have major implications for the 40,000 workers in Britain's Aerospace industry too why the change of heart because say the Germans since it was first conceived in the chill light of the Cold War in 1983 the need for an ultra high-tech Spitfire has quite simply gone away the NATO nightmare has passed us by the horror of that nightmare is appallingly easy to describe it's a scenario in which the enemy always wears a Soviet uniform and the tanks and armored Ground Forces always pour over the Eastern European Horizon the Soviet Air Force too is heading west bombers streak across the North Sea barely minutes from the airfields power stations ports and radar sites which are their targets 5 miles in front of the bombers are a few of the latest long range escorts the supremely capable suoy 27s known to Nato as flankers as this unique Archive of an exercise held deep within what used to be the Soviet Union chillingly demonstrates Central Europe would meanwhile be getting seriously [Music] unhealthy short range bombers and ground attack aircraft would be in the air over the battlefield again escorted by Fighters and again among some pretty ancient 50s and 60s aircraft would be several squadrons of the Soviet Union's more modern dog Fighter the mig29 fulcrum stationed at Frontline bases in East Germany these short range Fighters would be among the first to greet the NATO Air Forces within minutes or so the nightmare scenario goes the Skies over Central Europe would have become a chaotic melee of spinning and swirling aircraft dodging missiles dodging each other and trying to figure out who's who and who's where from the increasingly confused electronic picture of an unfolding Armageddon the central front in Europe would have been a very Hightech operation uh lots of uh electromagnetic type Warfare going on some very sophisticated surface to- air missiles around a very high threat to use that jug and high threat environment to fly airplanes around it and uh some very capable airplanes on the other side that have got to be shut down it was becoming clear as the ' 80s dawned that the traditional NATO nightmare of the 60s and '70s which had been characterized by the overwhelming quantity of Soviet Weaponry was being transformed by the steady addition of technological capability and quality the new mig29 which were entering service in 1983 could not only climb at 12 m a minute and cruise at over two times the speed of sound but were also equipped with infrared sensors in their noses and laser rangefinders for their guns and although at that time the Soviet Union's fighter designs lacked the sophisticated computerized flight controls which were being introduced into Western aircraft that lack was amply counterbalanced by highly Advanced aerodynamics one of the designers of the mig29 said recently that they began by perfecting the ideal wing for a fighter no more than that just the wing they then added a couple of engines a nose and a tail to see how much the ideal Wings performance was compromised countless visits to the wind tunnel later this is what they came up with a short-range fighter so maneuverable that in the later years of glasnost and perista the experienced jet pilots who saw it perform at air shows could barely believe their eyes well having watched the airplane fly the farm a show and then at the Paris Air Show um it was self-evident that this aircraft had this ability to abruptly maneuver and pitch in a way that the sort of aircraft I'd flown had not and and I was extremely interested to know whether that was a difficult thing to do in the airplane or whether it was apparently as easy and as safe as it looked I talked to the mcoy people and said I wanted to assess its low-p speed handling qualities and they were very happy to show those off human nature um they're proud of it uh it's good it was world class and and it was indeed it was the easiest jet airplane to maneuver at low speed that I have ever flown I mean it was it was more like a training second world war by plane you know in terms of that flexibility and ease of doing Maneuvers quite unlike any other jet airplane I FL so safe and so straightforward to maneuver at high angles of attack just 10 years prior to John Farley's unprecedented test drive in 199 90 Military Intelligence analysts in the west would have sold their Granny's for a chance to learn at firsthand how the Mig designers had achieved such easily controllable lows speed maneuverability but it wasn't just the Mig which could tumble around the sky with such manifest agility intelligence reports were suggesting that the same aerodynamic skills which had been brought to bear on the Mig had also found their way into the design of another new generation Interceptor Fighter the suco su27 flanker like the mck this supersonic all- weather Interceptor fighter had first taken to the air in 1977 but unlike the mck this was a beast with exceptionally long range Leningrad to grimby and back on one tank of fuel this was also the fighter which the longrange NATO interceptors could expect to meet and its performance was therefore crucially interesting like the Mig here was an aircraft whose maneuverability defied description nowadays at air shows this aircraft routinely seems to achieve the impossible flying at extraordinary angles but did such aerobatic stunts ever have any real military value John Farley again this angle of attack of course is is the difference between the direction an airplane is pointing and the direction it's traveling I mean I hate waving my hands about but when you see an airplane go by like that you know it's pointing upwards and it's it's traveling horizontally we traditionally see that in a slow pass an e that angle that's the called the angle of attack that the airplane is at now if you're fighting another airplane um it is likely that you'll have roughly forward facing Armament in your fighter and it's likely that he will have forward facing Armament in his and so the name of the game of course is to get the other chap in front of you if he's in front of you the bad guy he can't shoot you and you have an opportunity to shoot him assuming you can get your aiming solution good enough but if on the other hand he's around the other side of a circle you're pointing one way he's pointing another and he can't shoot you you can't shoot him it's a standoff and so you're maneuvering to try and get behind the other guy you feel very safe and relaxed when he's on the other side of a circle and that Circle need not necessarily be in the horizontal of course it can be in any plane still a circle so far as as air combat maneuvering is concerned if this chat though has the ability to momentarily Point his airplane just for a second or two in a totally different direction perhaps up to 90° from that in which he's traveling are you going to be relaxed in close combat knowing that this chat can wipe out a large angular a difference very quickly and get a short burst off at you now there will be tremendous disadvantages for him doing that like he will slow down he'll lose a lot of energy and he'll be sort of Sitting Duck for your mate who may be with you but is that any consolation to you if he shot you down in the process which is after all what this gruesome game is all about at around the time that the suco flankers and Mig fulcrums were rolling off the Soviet production lines in the early ' 80s the NATO Air Forces were almost entirely equipped with American aircraft and that wasn't just because there were 31 US Air Force squadrons based in Germany at the time it was simply that many of Europe's Air Forces had bought American Technology much of which had survived the test of combat in an earlier encounter Vietnam the principal fighter aircraft of that era was the McDonald Douglas Phantom which first flew in 1958 like every fighter plane ever designed this aircraft ended up spending a lot of its time firing its guns at Targets on the ground and dropping bombs somewhere in the vicinity of the enemy but it could also hold its own as an air superiority fighter and by the early '70s it had entered service with Britain's Navy and Air Force as well as a number of other European air forces such as Germany's luffer where they're still in service to this day by the early ' 80s however Europe's Aerospace industry was developing a poon for collaborative Ventures Concord the Anglo French Jaguar the Airbus civil airliner and perhaps most significantly this the tornado in which Germany Italy and Britain had all been involved but the tornado was never intended to be an air superiority fighter its engines were designed for endurance and economy rather than rapid response or brute power and its mission was ground attack and longrange interception it isn't a particularly agile Beast very few bombers are but back in 1983 what the air forces of Europe were clamoring for was a dog fighter to beat the migs and suo of the Soviet Air Force for many years the Royal Air Force has wanted an agile Fighter the problem of course is affordability and looking for partners and getting the right atmosphere but the European fighter itself started as an idea an outline Target is the formal word for it in about 1983 clearly at that stage the main threat was perceived to be the Warsaw PCT uh which means USSR aircraft at that stage uh and one looks at the classic and highly successful combat aircraft designers like mikoyan and suoy one says what are they doing uh and I suppose the anyone would look at the the aircraft out there now and say one of the aircraft you've surely got to be capable of matching is the flanker the suco 27 it's a very good airplane and one wants to be able to meet and better that after much deliberation and debate this was the design the five European collaborators agreed to develop to meet that Soviet challenge a single seat twin engine delta wing with a pair of four planes known as canards just ahead of the cockpit as the aircraft took shape in the Silicon ship imagination of the manufacturers computers the designers were figuring out not only how to build the ighter but how to fly it every square inch of the structure was subjected to the varying stresses that each phase of flight would generate and later that data would then be verified against the actual results recorded on a sort of flying laboratory known as the experimental aircraft project or [Music] EAP a combination of experimental design and bits of old tornado funded by industry as well as by the British government to test out the new technologies that might be incorporated into the Euro Fighter armed with the data acquired from each flight the designers would be able to return to the drawing board to see whether the complex calculations of air flow pressures and forces that the computer had come up with bore any relation to reality but before the EAP could fly the numerous computer designs and configurations had to be tested in the relative safety of the terrestrial wind tunnels different Wing shapes twin Tails different Canard positions every possible permutation of the Euro Fighters design was hurled into the face of the artificial hurricans that can be routinely summoned up here but in the mid 80s other storms were buffeting the five Nation Euro Fighter project no other government it seemed wanted to contribute to the cost of the EAP technology demonstrator no one seemed able to agree on an ideal weight for the fighter they couldn't even agree on a name for it so settled on the European fighter aircraft epha and then finally after protracted discussions one of the five Partners in the epha project France declined to continue if she couldn't be the leader the computerss meanwhile continue to fly the imaginary airplane through imaginary air flows while the one and only EAP began to test the systems that had been built into it powered by two tornado engines the EAP eventually flew for 195 hours probing the limits of lowspeed and high-speed flight verifying in reality what the computers had said would happen such as how shock waves would form around its nose as it blasted through the the sound barrier but the EAP was more than just some kind of flying wind tunnel one of the questions it was designed to answer was how much of the future epa's loadbearing structure could be made from new lightweight materials such as carbon fiber laminates the technology of carbon fiber Composites is now fairly well known and has been used in civil airlin liners and Formula 1 racing cars for years basically sheets or strips of resin impregnated carbon fiber are laid down one on top of the other in a precise order and oriented in a carefully predetermined Direction and then cured in an oven high-tech plywood the stren of any part depends on how many layers you use and where you put them nothing it seems could be simpler lighter or apparently more cost effective you can lay up carbon fiber into shapes which if you were to make them by oldfashioned methods of metal bashing would mean a a large number of people beating out shapes and then Riv in them together or welding them together to form one complex shape very labor intensive very expensive with carbon fiber composite techniques you can make very complex shapes very cheaply and reduce the weight and that's a revolution I think perhaps the single most important thing in in epha technology by combining the weight Savings of carbon fiber technology with other new materials such as aluminium lithium Alloys and devising new construction methods that can minimize the amounts of materials required epha is claimed to be 30% lighter than it would have been if manufactured in more conventional ways not surprisingly weight Savings of that order translate directly into increases in performance and maneuverability but weight is only half of the equation engine thrust is the other important variable and for epha the European Consortium reached the early decision to design an entirely new engine but but although it too will incorporate A Fistful of technological firsts there are still some techniques of engine manufacturer which are slightly older we make turbine blades today almost exclusively by what's called The Lost wax process that's a process that goes back many years indeed the Chinese used it over 3,000 years ago what you do is you make a model of the blade in wax you then coat the wax with a ceramic shell melt the wax out that gives you a perfect female mold in which you then create an exact replica of the wax pattern in metal now that in terms of turbine technology has been around for probably something like 20 or 30 years what we've been doing over the last 10 years is developing the way in which the solidification takes place of that molten metal we actually grow selectively one Crystal to cover the whole of the blade shape the advantage of that is that you get the maximum strength then from the material because all of those interfaces between individual crystals is actually a source of weakness in the material so it's a very much stronger blade therefore a much longer life or a higher temperature capability that you can get from that selfs same material like the aircraft it will power the EPA engine is also a collaborative Venture curiously it is here in the anticipated design requirements of the engine that the differing combat requirements for epha are most readily apparent we start from all four nations wanting a fighter airplane optimized for a to a combat but if you look at the particular threat scenarios that at least existed at the time that design was put together in the case of the United Kingdom we have a very large area of the north northern coast to to defend and the way that is done is for to have the the fighter airplanes airborne and therefore they have to have very low fuel consumption uh whilst they're doing what we call combat Air Patrol they then have to accelerate and intercept any wouldbe Intruder that contrasts with the German situation which at the time we're talking about of course we still had East Germany as part of the Warsaw Pact and West Germany therefore had to have an plane that they could scramble very quickly and they were looking for the very shortest time of intercept from ground to uh Mission and while the designers wrestle to fit the engine to those two widely differing combat requirements as well as to the plane itself others are wrestling to strike that critical balance between using proven technology and taking a gamble on Innovation with a combat engine such as ej200 which is being designed for service during The Next Century it's important that we don't just rely on yesterday's technology therefore we have a lot of state-of-the-art Technology within the engine however it's also important to ensure that we have a reliable engine therefore there is combination of both basic or current technology and futuristic technology you don't just go for Innovative technology because it's there any more than you reject now technology because it's old you're striking a balance between the risk and and The Proven quality in the case of epha we had a tremendous advantage of a whole series of technology demonstrators and indeed we even had a flying vehicle the experimental aircraft program and that takes a great deal of the risk of these technology leaps out of the development of epha carbon fiber technology new construction methods Delta canards unstable airplanes high-speed flight control systems that sort of thing we're not complacent about the risk but we know a great deal more because of the technology demonstrators shortly after the EAP technology demonstrator had made its last flight in May of 1991 the House of Commons accounts committee calculated that its use had saved the epha project around 850 million in development costs and although it was never intended to be an epha prototype there had never been any question what this demonstrator was demonstrating combat capable Supersonic and subsonic man maneuverability against the Soviet threat but towards the end of 1989 something happened which was to call the entire project into question something unexpected Unthinkable even the threat appeared to be crumbling away before our very eyes not only the Berlin wall but the Iron Curtain itself was being dismantled The warsa Pact was quite simply disintegrated and familiar adversaries were trampled underfoot in the rush to be free of an old tyranny but the new tyranny of poverty hunger and bankruptcy was no better and on New Year's Eve last the winter revolution of 1917 finally ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the establish M of the Commonwealth of independent states much of the once proud once feared Soviet Air Force was put out to grass and some of the older less reliable aircraft were mothballed but there were still some pilots and some aircraft which could take to the air despite the massive fuel bills maintaining a military presence in the uncertain times which they and their new leaders now face others however are having to content themselves with more fuel efficient training methods when practicing the air show aerobatics which may soon become as vital to the future of their country as the missiles they once used to carry under their wings 2 years ago when these once secret Soviet aircraft last convened at fur the red stars on their tail and wing tips told you everything you needed to know about who they were and what they were doing here the displays were designed to demonstrate skill and capability and few who saw them were left in any doubt about either now the red stars have gone but does that mean that the threat which these aircraft used to represent has disappeared as well they're made more significant now than the where when I started because in those days it was relatively simple with Warsaw packed on one side white hats of NATO on the other side now there's a proliferation of those weapons those aircraft are being actually sold or aggressively marketed all over the world and God knows where they'll be in the year 2020 two years ago as the graceful suco flanker touched down on the farra runway it didn't much matter that there was no word in the Russian language for marketing the aircraft wasn't for sale this year by contrast both suco and Mig will be turning up with what they call Export versions of their most potent aircraft and farra will surely be very different this year for another reason too since they last all met some of the pilots here have been to war in the Gulf it was a war which was waged almost entirely from the air for nearly a month before the ground troops went into to reclaim qwa from the Iraqis it was a war which seemed to validate the claims made by The Advocates of overwhelming air power a message of the sales teams at fur this year won't hesitate to push for all its worth and although it was not a war in which very much air-to-air combat occurred for those whose aircraft were victorious like the McDonald Douglas f-15s and f-18s the grizzly sales potential of successful combat experience is inescapable The Familiar images will resurface once more and as the laser guided bombs and missiles fall unerringly towards their targets the paradoxical message that high technology Weapons Systems save lives and a cost effective will again be offered up for consideration and while the public cues once more to see inside the largest airplane ever to fly a Russian monster called Maria or dream those whose job it is to buy fighter aircraft will be faced with some testing choices in a wide open and recently battle proven marketpl and although there's undeniable camaraderie amongst the display pilots who fly at shows like farra swapping stories and showing each other their respective aircraft this year a number of Fighters including epha will be battling to the death for the attention of those Air Forces who will soon need to find replacements for their aging fighter squadrons at the top of the shopping list for some could be the relatively cheap Russian built migs and suco although they're not everyone's idea of a good buy you don't buy something to finish up as parity with a threat you go to war to win but in fact cost of ownership is a major consideration and the ex warsa packed countries did not build their aircraft to last for example the mig29 has a 2,000 hour fatigue life whereas EPA and most western airplanes have a 6,000 hour so you need basically three times the number of airplanes just to break the same as EPA and then of course the obvious question do you really want to be reliant on spares from downtown Russia when you're thinking about the year 2020 and then that ignores of course the obvious things the UK really ought to stay at the Forefront of those sorts of Technologies we don't have to give all of that over to somebody else so there's a whole complex raft of reasons why you don't just rush out and by an airplane like the su27 so what could you rush out and buy one of these perhaps the Sab griin from Sweden unlike almost any other of the new generation of Fighters you could have some of these next year and although it's rather small and lightweight has only one engine isn't very stealthy and has limited range and payload it employs composite construction and and computerized flight control technology at a mere 20 million the griin is a clear rival to epha and S believe it would look very dashing with German LT buffer markings if you'd prefer something with a little more panach and can afford to pay for it the £ 42 million daso Rafal might be worth considering this was the aircraft the French pulled out of the epha project to pursue on their own and at first sight seems very similar the same Delta shape with canards either side of the cockpit this too started Life as a twin engine single seat [Music] fighter but already the Rafal is being developed into a two- seat ground attack fighter and the original air superiority capabilities are beginning to be compromised like so many long-term military projects which can take over a decade to mature the Rafal has under gone constant revision and modification as a result of changing political influences within France and as always the balance has to be struck between capability and affordability what's sometimes known as the numbers game the numbers game with airplanes should you have a few very capable airplanes very expensive very capable do everything sort of thing always win or is it better to have um a larger number of only 80% capable airplanes I think that's a very difficult question it's it's a problem that has is getting worse and worse for everybody to solve take the Americans and the and the F22 concept of airplane arguably the most capable fighter airplane that the world has yet designed General all round air superiority stealthy very agile high angle of attack you name it it's going but at a price penalty a price penalty of7 million per aircraft the cost of a mediumsized airliner why so expensive well among the many new capabilities which the F22 incorporates is a distinctive jet nozzle technology known as thrust vectoring rather like the Harrier the F22 can deflect the direction of its jet exhaust up and down and this results in quite extraordinary agility but its agility at a price few could afford now is it better to have a small number of these incredibly good airplanes or a large number of less good ones well what's the risk of a small number uh you lose them through some freak of nature the hang a roof falls down or there's a sabot or they're caught on the ground or your intelligence was wrong um or you can't deploy them in time uh you have to keep them all in their special base and move them to wherever they might be needed only close to the time you can't you can't have them scattered around the world ready so you know you have these sort of constraints with a small number um but on the other hand and the pilots would say I don't want an inferior airplane I don't want to be one of the 500 pilots who will die when our 5,000 airplanes win the war you can see the problem for the Western mentality that the more capability you put in the airplane the safer the man is likely to be you finish up ultimately I suppose with one very expensive airplane and then it's not available on the day or somebody goes and breaks it which is what happened to the f 22 only a few months ago it was to have been a routine test flight combined with what's known as a photo opportunity a press call in other words everything seemed to be going well at first but as the aircraft began to draw level with the camera it was clear that something was seriously wrong with the controls the thrust vectoring nozzles and the elevators seemed to be somehow out of phase with each other the result was inevitable but fortunately not [Music] fatal it was exactly this kind of computer control problem which the EAP test program was designed to explore like the F22 the EAP is an unstable and therefore agile aircraft which cannot be flown without the aid of a computer the problem is when should that computer be allowed to overrule the human pilot you've got to ensure that whatever the pilot demands of the aircraft won't break the airplane if you like or won't cause it to depart from normal flight enter a spin for example and whistle down and crash and you've got to ensure that the pilot does not incapacitate himself all of these things are designed into the flight control system so that if the pilot asks the aircraft to do something impossible the aircraft won't do it you need to have software that takes account of all the inputs and in presenting them to the pilot has its own ideas about what the pilot ought to be doing or the fact that the pilot ought to be reacting so that if it sees it's diving towards the ground at 10 ft or if it sees a missile's only 100 ft away and about to hit it and the pilot is doing nothing then it will start questioning him about that now if the pilot has departed at that stage that's tough luck on the computer it's probably going to about to cease to exist as well but you can build in some sort of uh evasive reaction and in indeed we will build into this airplane it's part of the scheme that where a pilot gets totally disoriented for for example he can press a button which wherever the aircraft is recovers it to straighten level flight into a shallow climb and waits there for him to be ready to take over again fortunately nearly all of these systems can be tested in the flight simulator without endangering life or limb the simulator mimics every aspect of the aircraft behavior and enables Pilots to carry out the entire range of Maneuvers and routine training procedures without ever leaving the ground bit short as far as the computers which drive this simulator concerned this ether cockpit really is flying flying through a virtual sky above a virtual terrain and using up virtual fuel a warning light or a computer synthesized voice prompts him to check the fuel system up until now the computers on board have been managing the fuel flow now however it's time for the pilot to do something like pulling at the nearest Airborne gas station the computers will of course root the virtual fuel into the correct virtual fuel tanks and won't bother the pilot again until something else comes up the simulator is more than just a giant arcade game however however it's also a crucial ergonomic laboratory in which the cockpit designers can finally assess the user friendliness of their prototype display panels panels which were themselves designed within the virtual world of a computer without ever having to bend a metal sheet or pop a rivet these control panel prototypes can be modified and improved by means of the touch sensitive screens on the designer's computer terminal once the design seems satisfactory then a working mockup is constructed and installed into the simulator for further testing to date this virtual epha has flown for over 500 hours and has covered a distance of over a quar of a million virtual Miles when the time comes to climb into the real EA cockpit however there will be nothing virtual about the nature of the task the pilot has ahead of him his job will be to locate and destroy an enemy who is probably planning on it working out exactly the other way around how then will a 21st century dog fight begin well let's start in the classic way that the adves are miles apart and the first engagement is going to be beyond the visual range and for that you need to be supersonic you need to be able to maneuver supersonically clearly you need the systems to cope with Beyond visual range radar infrared search and track and so on Good Pilot awareness for this man on his own the missile for that combat is the amram the Advanced medium-range Air to a missile once your amram missiles are in the air or so the theory goes you can turn away and leave them to it their own onboard radar and computer circuitry will hunt down and destroy the target wherever it goes but of course your enemy probably has something similar to amam 2 and therefore it's vital that he doesn't see you before you see him this is a simple logic which drives the study of stealth technology and here at the radar range on the laner coast full-sized EAP and EPA models have in zapped with every conceivable radar frequency to see how reflective they are the results enable the engineers to incorporate stealth enhancing changes in the shapes of certain body panels and fixings and would also help determine which of the many radar absorbent coating should be used and where for many years the UK has been at the Forefront of radar absorbent materials so there's a whole amalgam of things but in the case of epha radar stealth has to be kept in balance in balance with agility in balance with other features and of course at the end imbalance with affordability which is why we didn't go from an all aspect stealth aircraft like the advanced tactical fighter epha has a job to do which is to destroy the enemy and to do that it's a tradeoff between can he see you and can you see him it's no you good you being so small and undetectable that you don't have room to carry a radar you've got to have a radar which enables you to detect him and that will typically be I don't know getting on for 3 ft across if you look at a modern aircraft now that means that you're going to have some possibility of being seen and it's a tradeoff between the size of your aircraft the kit it carries uh and its stealthiness clearly every time you use a radar you're giving away information which says I am here you're also giving away information if the other chap is clever that says um this is my radar and if he has any good intelligence he'll be able to say ah yes that's a mark one epha or whatever and so you need to use these things sparingly you need to try and gather as much information as you can with a minimum possible amount of transmission of your own position perhaps the most effective way of doing that nowadays is by using what's called passive electrooptic sensing this technology generates pictures from the differences in temperature between an object and its surroundings and in this picture of a MIG taking off at farra in 1990 the bright hot plumes of its after burning jet exhaust show up very clearly but electrooptic Imaging can also differentiate between quite small differences in temperature as this image of a helicopter demonstrates the rapid movement of the tips of the rotor blades through the air has warmed them slightly and they now glow a bit more brightly than the slower moving intersections of the blades which is also why the mig's nose cone is glowing by the end of its display by exploiting these minute temperature differences in the environment it has been possible for some time now to present a pilot who is flying low with an image of his surroundings on a screen in his cockpit the software in the system will tell him where the hills and obstacles are and will him to keep an eye on his altitude all of the flight data and targeting information he needs is shown on the display and this technology was used extensively in the Gulf War turning night effectively into day what hasn't been available until now however is the ability to display that same information to the pilot on the inside of his visor so wherever he chooses to look he will see an enhanced image of his surroundings the effect on the pilots who have tested the night helmet in Flight is dramatic off on the right side there's a uh plant or there's a 1:00 there's a Refinery of sorts oh yeah I see it can't believe I'm flying 200 ft looking off to the right side of the refinery in the middle of the night some things are surely amazing for the epha designers the next logical step was to slave the weapon system to the helmet as well to produce a helmet mounted sight the helmet mounted sight is a very simple concept really and it is works on the thought that you can have a site that since it's strapped to the Pilot's head can be exactly lined up with his normal sensors his eyes if you will uh and by fitting sensors around the cockpit they can determine exactly in space where that helmet is and they can determine which way it is pointing and that can be directed and linked directly into the weapon system and into the computer so that when the pilot looks at something uh he can say to the computer what I'm looking at now is where I want you to point and where I want you to either track or to fire a weapon uh and in a sense it's just like aiming a camera um you've seen people parachuting with cameras strapped to their helmets they have a little sight in front of their eye and they know that if they look through that the camera will point that way it's a very sophisticated Advance on that technique [Music] really and to complete the transformation from real reality to Virtual Reality another of the systems being tested here invites a pilot to fly a blue brick through a computer-generated stereoscopic l landscape it's a system which could conceivably remove the pilot from the cockpit entirely one day although as one test pilot Riley observed after having seen these images perhaps not in the next couple of weeks at the moment the reality of the EA project is that seven aircraft will be built and flown between now and 1999 but in November of this year the four defense ministers will discuss the results of the EPA cost cutting study and nobody can predict what hairs will be set loose at that meeting it's political will that starts projects quite frankly and it's political will that sustains them the job of the technologist in all this is of course to persevere with the sort of development work that we've been speaking about uh but it's it's also very much I suggest to make sure that politicians who at the end of the day run countries and take decisions have available to them all the very best analytical data uh and the best um study of the technology so that when they take decisions they can be fully aware of the implications of those decisions you have to be I think pretty cautious before saying that well the Cold War tensions are over and we can all relax um if you're looking um you know 25 to 30 years ahead you have to be conscious of the possibility that a bona partis leader uh of Russia's old imperialist uh Ambitions might arise again in Moscow the race between the new democracies and the new despots could be a close one in the former countri of the Soviet Union that new dictators could emerge again in the Middle East and elsewhere so you have to be cautious and it's no fault of a defense minister to ER on the side of of preparedness and caution when you plan ahead for the next 30 years and if there were single symbol of the uncertainties that beset defense analysts in late 20th century Europe this would be it an ex- Soviet Union mig29 Frontline fighter no more than 7 or 8 years old which Now Sports The Livery of a unified German Luft vaffa the Germans have inherited 24 of these competent if somewhat basic aircraft will they be tempted to procure a few more or will they look to Sweden to replace their ancient Phantoms there are of course truckloads of capable American planes on offer too but perhaps after all the Germans will decide that epha is the right program once they've got their 1994 general election out of the way epha is indeed living in interesting times the courses of action open to to Britain seem very much clearer if those who make such decisions want an air superiority fighter then epha is undoubtedly The Logical Choice perhaps the more difficult question is whether we want or need a 21st century splitfire but the thorniest question of them all is whether we want to maintain the industrial capability to design and build such aircraft not only epha but its successors too that

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Keywords: footagedirect, digicomtv, eurofighter typhoon, aviation, war, airpower, clips, footage, archive clips, archive footage, documentary, fighter aircraft, free, free documentary, educational, free view

Id: J7C4kS-0HwI

Length: 51min 34sec (3094 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2013