Eurofighter Typhoon
Europe’s canard-delta
A four-nation European air-superiority fighter — deliberately unstable, tamed by fly-by-wire and pushed by twin supercruising EJ200s into one of the most agile 4.5-generation jets ever fielded. Built by Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain, still in production and frontline across Europe and the Gulf in 2026.
Four nations, one fighter
The Eurofighter Typhoon is a four-nation industrial epic. In 1986 the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain formalised the Eurofighter consortium — pooling design, engineering and money to build a sovereign European air-superiority fighter to rival anything American or Russian. Its technology roots lay in British Aerospace’s EAP demonstrator, which first flew on 8 August 1986 and validated the canard-delta, fly-by-wire configuration the whole programme would bet billions on.
The first development aircraft, DA1, flew from Manching in March 1994; a production contract for an initial 620 jets followed in 1998, split into progressively upgraded Tranches. Type acceptance came on 30 June 2003, and the German Air Force led service entry that August, followed by Italy, the UK and Spain. The Typhoon is deliberately aerodynamically unstable, tamed by quadruplex fly-by-wire and pushed by twin supercruising EJ200s — trading stealth for raw energy, climb and turn performance.
It began as a Cold War interceptor and matured into a genuine swing-role fighter: sweeping the skies one sortie, striking ground targets the next. From RAF Quick Reaction Alert intercepts and combat over Libya in 2011 to a growing export book across the Gulf, the Typhoon has become one of the most successful European fighters of its generation — and, with fresh Tranche 4/5 orders and a 2025 Turkey deal, it remains in production in 2026.
01The Eurofighter Typhoon’s origins: how four nations built a single canard-delta fighter
The programme is managed today by Eurofighter Jagdflugzeug GmbH, with industrial partners BAE Systems, Airbus Defence & Space and Leonardo, and engines from the Eurojet consortium. Workshare, final-assembly lines and cost were split four ways — a structure that produced decades of negotiation and workshare fights, but also Europe’s most successful collaborative fighter, still rolling off four national assembly lines.
Production continues in 2026 with new Tranche 4/5 orders from Germany and Spain and a 2025 Turkey deal signed via the UK. More than 600 have been built — 613 delivered as of September 2025 — a moving figure as the line keeps running.
What makes the Typhoon special
Unstable on purpose
The Typhoon is intentionally aerodynamically unstable in pitch. Foreplane canards ahead of the delta wing generate lift and instant nose authority, while a quadruplex digital fly-by-wire system makes thousands of corrections a second to keep it flyable. The payoff is exceptional instantaneous turn rate, climb and high-alpha handling — a genuine energy-fighter in the dogfight.
Twin EJ200s and supercruise
Two Eurojet EJ200 afterburning turbofans give a high thrust-to-weight ratio and let the Typhoon supercruise — sustain supersonic speed without afterburner — improving persistence, range and combat energy over jets that must burn reheat to go fast.
Sensor fusion at 9 g
The Captor radar — mechanically scanned Captor-M, upgraded to the Captor-E AESA array — is paired with the passive PIRATE infrared search-and-track, defensive aids and data-link, fused into a glass cockpit with helmet-mounted sight so a single pilot can fight while pulling up to 9 g.
02The Eurofighter Typhoon’s agility: why instability plus fly-by-wire beats a stable airframe
Designers made the Typhoon unstable, then handed control to a computer making constant corrections. A naturally stable jet resists manoeuvre; an unstable one wants to depart controlled flight, so every twitch of the stick is amplified into razor-sharp response by the flight-control laws. The result is agility no naturally stable jet in its class can match — the pilot commands, the software keeps it flyable, and the airframe turns like almost nothing else of its generation.
03The Eurofighter Typhoon’s supercruise: fast without the fuel-guzzling reheat
Supercruise means sustaining supersonic flight without afterburner. The Typhoon’s twin EJ200s — around 90 kN each in reheat, 60 kN dry — give enough dry thrust to hold supersonic speed, which buys more range, more persistence and more combat energy than a jet that must light reheat and drink fuel to go fast. It is a performance trait shared with only a handful of the world’s top fighters, and a signature of the Typhoon’s air-superiority pedigree.
Full Eurofighter Typhoon specifications
Figures describe a Tranche 3 single-seat Typhoon, the build standard behind the RAF’s FGR4 and the Omani, Kuwaiti and Qatari fleets, and the baseline from which Tranche 4 and Tranche 5 are derived. The airframe has barely changed since 1994; almost everything that separates one Typhoon from another is software, radar and wiring. Where the early Tranche 1 jets or the two-seat trainer differ, the delta is given in grey. Eurofighter GmbH publishes very little hard performance data, so several numbers below are the best-attested figure rather than an official one.
Dimensions & weights
- Crew
- 1 (the two-seater — RAF T3, Italian TF-2000A, Spanish CE.16 — shares the same external dimensions and keeps the gun and full combat capability, but carries roughly 300 kg more structure and less internal fuel, and in every air force is flown almost entirely as a trainer. Britain scrapped 16 of its two-seaters for spares in 2018 because they were Tranche 1 airframes that could never take the later radar.)
- Length
- 15.96 m (52 ft 4 in, including the nose probe)
- Wingspan
- 10.95 m (35 ft 11 in)
- Height
- 5.28 m (17 ft 4 in)
- Wing area
- 51.2 m² (551 sq ft) — a cropped delta with 53-degree leading-edge sweep, plus 2.4 m² (26 sq ft) of all-moving foreplane ahead of it
- Empty weight
- 11,000 kg (24,250 lb)
- Loaded weight
- 16,000 kg (35,270 lb) in the air-defence fit — internal fuel, gun, four medium-range and two short-range missiles
- Max takeoff weight
- 23,500 kg (51,800 lb)
- Internal fuel
- ~4,500 kg (~9,900 lb, Eurofighter’s own figure; Jane’s has quoted 5,000 kg. Fuel sits in the wings, the fuselage and the fin. Tranche 3 airframes were wired and plumbed for conformal fuel tanks, but no operator has ever bought them.)
- External fuel
- Up to 3 × 1,000 L drop tanks (two underwing, one on the centreline; a 1,500 L supersonic tank exists but is rarely seen. Total fuel with external tanks is about 7,600 kg / 16,750 lb.)
- Max external load
- ~7,500 kg (~16,500 lb). Published figures scatter badly: Jane’s-derived sources say 6,500 kg, BAE’s own 2018 export brochure claims "in excess of 9,000 kg". Neither is wrong, they simply count different stations and different weapons.
- Hardpoints
- 13 (8 under-wing, 5 under-fuselage. The two inboard wing stations and the centreline take fuel tanks; the outboard wing stations are wired for short-range missiles or, on Tranche 3, for wingtip electronic-warfare pods.)
- Wing loading
- 312 kg/m² (64 lb/sq ft) at typical air-defence weight — low for a modern fighter, and the main reason the Typhoon turns the way it does
Performance
- Max speed
- Mach 2.0 — 2,125 km/h at 11,000 m (1,320 mph at 36,000 ft), the RAF’s published figure and the best-attested one. German and Austrian defence-ministry documents quote Mach 2.35 or 2,495 km/h; that is almost certainly a design limit rather than a demonstrated speed, and no operator flies the aeroplane anywhere near it.
- Speed at sea level
- 1,530 km/h (951 mph, Mach 1.25)
- Supercruise
- Mach 1.1 to 1.5 without reheat — Mach 1.1 with a real RAF air-to-air load, Mach 1.5 clean. Mach 1.21 has been demonstrated with a combat load on a hot day. This is the Typhoon’s single most useful trait: it can transit, launch a Meteor and disengage supersonically while burning subsonic fuel, which extends missile reach considerably.
- Rate of climb
- 315 m/s (62,000 ft/min). A peak instantaneous figure at low weight, not a sustained one; Eurofighter GmbH has never published an official number, and it should be read as an indication rather than a measurement.
- Service ceiling
- 16,764 m (55,000 ft), with a maximum flight altitude of 20,000 m (65,000 ft)
- Combat radius
- ~1,390 km (~750 nmi) on a hi-lo-hi ground-attack profile; ~600 km (~325 nmi) flown low all the way. In the air-defence role it can hold a combat air patrol for three hours at 185 km (100 nmi) from base, or manage ten minutes on station at 1,390 km.
- Ferry range
- 3,790 km (2,355 mi) with three drop tanks; about 2,900 km (1,800 mi) on a more typical fit
- Takeoff run
- 300 m (985 ft) in the air-combat configuration; the published minimum runway requirement is 700 m (2,300 ft), which is why RAF Typhoons were able to operate from a public highway in Finland in September 2023 — a first for the type
- Acceleration
- Brakes-off to airborne in under 8 seconds and through the sound barrier in under 30. Thrust-to-weight is about 1.15 in the interceptor fit, so the aeroplane accelerates in a climb.
- Load factor
- +9 / −3 g with internal fuel and two AMRAAM. RAF and Spanish pilots wear full-cover anti-g trousers; German and Austrian crews use the Libelle hydrostatic suit, which also protects the arms.
Propulsion & systems
- Engines
- 2 × Eurojet EJ200 afterburning turbofans (a four-nation consortium of Rolls-Royce, MTU, Avio and ITP). A clean, compact, high-thrust design with a digital engine control unit per engine, a wide surge margin and a very good record; Eurojet has floated thrust-vectoring nozzles and a 15 per cent thrust growth package for years, and nobody has yet paid for either.
- Thrust each
- 60 kN dry, 90 kN with reheat (13,500 lbf and 20,230 lbf). A wartime setting raises this to 69 kN dry and 95 kN reheat, and the engine will take short bursts to 102 kN without damage.
- Gun
- 1 × 27 mm Mauser BK-27 revolver cannon, 150 rounds in the starboard wing root, firing at up to 1,700 rounds per minute. Britain proposed in 1999 to fit it only to the first 53 aircraft and never use it, carrying ballast instead; that decision was reversed in 2006 and the RAF has since strafed with it in Syria.
- Radar
- Euroradar CAPTOR-M mechanically scanned, or CAPTOR-E AESA depending on nation. ECRS Mk0 is the baseline AESA, on Kuwaiti and Qatari jets. ECRS Mk1 (Hensoldt and Indra) began live operational testing in June 2026 for Germany and Spain, with deliveries from 2027. ECRS Mk2 (Leonardo UK) adds electronic attack from the radar array itself, first flew in September 2024, and in January 2026 won a £453 million production contract for 40 RAF Tranche 3 aircraft; Italy has joined the programme. Most of the fleet still flies the mechanically scanned CAPTOR-M.
- Infrared search and track
- EuroFIRST PIRATE (Passive Infra-Red Airborne Track Equipment), mounted on the port side ahead of the windscreen. It can track up to 200 targets passively, doubles as a forward-looking infrared sensor for the head-up display, and gives the Typhoon a way to find and engage without radiating — but with no laser ranger, its ranging is inferred rather than measured.
- Defensive aids
- Praetorian DASS — 16 antenna arrays and 10 radomes driving a radar warning receiver, missile approach warning, an electronic countermeasures suite, chaff and flare dispensers, and a towed radar decoy on a wingtip pod. UK aircraft add a laser warning receiver. It is one of the better integrated self-protection suites in service, and it is fitted to almost every Typhoon in existence, Austrian aircraft excepted.
- Targeting pods
- Litening III, Litening 5, Sniper ATP or Damocles depending on operator. Litening is the common fit for the RAF and Luftwaffe; Britain and Germany have both been testing Litening 5.
- Cockpit
- Three colour multifunction head-down displays, wide-angle HUD, HMSS helmet-mounted sight, direct voice input — the voice-command system handles about 26 non-critical functions and was a genuine novelty in 2003. A Large Area Display to replace the three screens has been demonstrated but is not yet fielded.
- Ejection seat
- Martin-Baker Mk.16A zero-zero, with twin rocket-motor canopy jettison
- First flight
- 27 March 1994 (DA1 at Manching; the BAe EAP technology demonstrator that led to it flew on 6 August 1986, and the first RAF production aircraft on 14 February 2003)
- Service entry
- 2003 — Germany accepted its first series aircraft on 4 August 2003, Britain and Italy the same year, with Italy reaching initial operational capability in December 2005. Fourteen years elapsed between the 1988 development contract and the first squadron.
- Number built
- ~613 delivered by September 2025 against an order book of about 761, and production is still open. Tranche 1 accounted for 148 aircraft, Tranche 2 for 251 and Tranche 3A for 112; the rest are Tranche 4 and Tranche 5 aircraft still being built.
04The Eurofighter Typhoon’s cost and numbers: what a four-nation fighter actually runs
Typhoon unit costs are quoted anywhere from roughly $100 million to $125 million, but the figure is highly source-dependent: flyaway, program and export prices differ enormously by tranche, operator and year, and are often bundled into multi-billion support packages. Treat any single number as indicative, not authoritative.
Delivery counts move too. More than 600 airframes have been built — 613 delivered as of September 2025 — and production continues, so the total keeps climbing. Speed figures are similarly hedged: Mach 2 is the commonly published maximum, while the RAF cites Mach 1.6 as an operational figure.
Armament & payload
The Typhoon’s weapons list is really four national weapons lists wearing the same airframe
The Typhoon was specified in the 1980s to shoot down Soviet fighters over Germany, and for its first five years in service that is very nearly all it could do. Everything else — laser-guided bombs, cruise missiles, a working targeting pod, a gun the RAF was willing to load — arrived afterwards, paid for in national instalments by four governments that rarely wanted the same weapon at the same time. The result is a genuinely excellent swing-role fighter and a maddening one to describe, because the fit depends less on the aircraft than on the flag on the tail. A British FGR4 carries Meteor, ASRAAM, Paveway IV, Brimstone and Storm Shadow; a German jet carries IRIS-T, Taurus and Laser JDAM and none of the British weapons; an Austrian jet carries a gun and two kinds of air-to-air missile and has never been cleared to drop anything at all. Every list below is national. Treat "the Typhoon carries X" as a claim about one air force, never about the type.
Gun
- 1 × 27 mm Mauser BK-27 revolver cannon in the starboard wing root, 150 rounds, up to 1,700 rounds per minute — a linkless-feed development of the gun built for the Tornado.
- Britain spent years trying not to use it. A 1999 cost-saving proposal would have fitted the gun to only the first 53 aircraft and never fired it operationally, with ballast in the bay of the rest; the decision was reversed in 2006 and the RAF cleared it against surface targets in 2013.
- It has been fired in anger. RAF Typhoons strafed Islamic State positions in Syria, and in his 2022 memoir the pilot Mike Sutton describes his gun jamming after 26 rounds mid-strafe, a fault he says was well known to both aircrew and ground crew.
- Fitted by every operator — Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK, Austria, Saudi Arabia and Oman all carry it. For Austria, whose jets have no air-to-ground clearance whatsoever, the cannon is the only weapon available for anything other than a missile shot.
Air-to-air
- MBDA Meteor — the ramjet-powered beyond-visual-range missile, and the Typhoon’s best argument. Its sustained-thrust motor gives a no-escape zone several times that of an AMRAAM, and fired supersonically from a supercruising Typhoon it reaches further still. Carried by the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and, under the 2025 package, Turkey.
- AIM-120 AMRAAM — the older radar-guided round, still the bulk magazine for Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Up to four recess-mounted under the fuselage plus more on the wings.
- ASRAAM (AIM-132) — the British short-range infrared missile, unusually long-legged for its class. UK only, and Turkey under the new contract. On 14 December 2021 an RAF Typhoon used one to destroy a small hostile drone near Al-Tanf in Syria, the type’s first air-to-air kill.
- IRIS-T — the German-led short-range equivalent, with a very high off-boresight seeker. Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria and Saudi Arabia. No Typhoon carries both ASRAAM and IRIS-T operationally; the choice tracks national industry, not tactics.
- AIM-9L Sidewinder remains cleared as a fallback on most fleets. Austria’s Tranche 1 jets are the outlier: no Praetorian DASS, no PIRATE, air policing only.
Air-to-surface guided
- Storm Shadow / SCALP EG — the 1,300 kg stealthy cruise missile, two per aircraft, released hundreds of kilometres out. Cleared under the Phase 2 Enhancement package after a first firing in November 2015. UK, Italy, Saudi Arabia and Turkey; Germany and Spain do not have it.
- MBDA Brimstone (Brimstone II and later) — a small millimetric-radar and laser dual-mode missile designed to kill moving vehicles without collateral damage, up to eighteen on a Typhoon. First live firing July 2017 under Phase 3 Enhancements. UK, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Turkey.
- Taurus KEPD 350 — the German-Swedish stand-off cruise missile, the Luftwaffe and Spanish equivalent of Storm Shadow. Germany and Spain only.
- AGM-88E AARGM — the anti-radiation missile at the heart of the German Typhoon EK, fifteen aircraft being converted to replace the Tornado ECR in the suppression-of-air-defences role, with Saab Arexis jamming pods. NATO certification is expected around 2030.
- SPEAR 3 — the 100 kg turbojet-powered mini cruise missile, eight per pylon, intended to swarm air defences. It was fired from a Typhoon as a capability demonstration as early as 2016, but UK funding priority has gone to the F-35B, which flew with it for the first time in May 2026. It is not yet an operational Typhoon weapon. Anti-ship remains the conspicuous gap: MBDA has offered Marte ER, six rounds on six pylons, and Harpoon, Sea Brimstone and RBS-15 have all been studied. None has been contracted by any operator.
Bombs
- Paveway IV — the 500 lb dual-mode GPS and laser weapon that is the RAF’s workhorse, with a programmable fuze that can be set to burst above, on or beneath a target and to strike at a chosen angle. UK, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Four fell on Houthi facilities in Yemen on 12 January 2024; four more sank the ex-USS Boone in a 2022 sinking exercise.
- Paveway II family — the 1,000 lb GBU-16 and enhanced EGBU-16 (UK, Spain, Oman), the 2,000 lb GBU-10 (Spain), and the 1,000 lb GBU-48 (UK, Germany, Spain, Saudi Arabia; German aircraft carry four).
- GBU-54 Laser JDAM — Germany’s chosen 500 lb GPS-and-laser bomb, integrated with Diehl and Boeing from 2018 as part of the Tranche 4 weapons package.
- The first Typhoon bomb dropped in anger was a GBU-16 over Libya on 12 April 2011 — and a Tornado GR4 had to designate the target for it, because too few Typhoon pilots had been trained in the air-to-ground role. That single fact says more about the programme’s first decade than any specification does.
- Small Diameter Bomb and the German HOPE/HOSBO glide family have been listed as planned for years without appearing on an operational aircraft.
Rockets
- LAU-131 pods with APKWS-guided Hydra 70 rockets, seven per pod, two pods per aircraft — new, cheap, and the most interesting thing to happen to the Typhoon’s armoury in a decade.
- The fit was first photographed at Warton in March 2026, confirmed against ground targets in April, and deployed operationally with No. IX (B) Squadron at RAF Akrotiri by May 2026 — roughly two months from first firing to combat use, which is not how this programme normally moves.
- The driver is drones. Shooting down a one-way attack UAV with an ASRAAM costs several hundred thousand pounds; a laser-guided 70 mm rocket costs a small fraction of that, and fourteen of them fit where two missiles used to.
- UK only. No other Typhoon operator has bought the capability, and no unguided rocket pod was ever a standard Typhoon store before this.
Pods & other stores
- Litening III and Litening 5 targeting pods — the common fit for the RAF and Luftwaffe, and the sensor that made the Tranche 1 "austere" air-to-ground capability possible under Britain’s £73 million Change Proposal 193. Sniper ATP and Damocles are cleared alternatives.
- Praetorian DASS wingtip pods carrying the towed radar decoy and electronic-countermeasures transmitters — these occupy the wingtips permanently on almost every Typhoon, and are effectively part of the airframe rather than a store.
- Saab Arexis escort-jamming pods on the German Typhoon EK, two under the wings, with emitter-location receivers at the wingtips. This is the closest the type comes to a dedicated electronic-attack aircraft.
- 1,000 L drop tanks, up to three. Almost every operational sortie carries at least one, because the Typhoon’s internal fuel fraction is unremarkable and its engines are thirsty in reheat.
- A reconnaissance pod has been offered repeatedly and bought by nobody; the RAF retired its Tornado-based tactical reconnaissance capability without replacing it on Typhoon.
Three typical loadouts
- Quick Reaction Alert (RAF)
- 4 × Meteor recessed under the fuselage, 2 × ASRAAM on the outboard wing stations, 150 rounds for the gun, one 1,000 L centreline tank. The standing UK air-defence fit, scrambled from Coningsby and Lossiemouth against Russian aircraft probing the North Sea and the North Atlantic, and flown in the same shape by Germany, Italy, Spain and Austria with their own missiles.
- Swing-role strike, Operation Shader
- 4 × Paveway IV, 2 × AMRAAM or Meteor, 2 × ASRAAM, a Litening pod and two 1,000 L tanks. The configuration that made the Typhoon useful over Iraq and Syria: it goes out as a bomber and comes home as a fighter without changing anything, which is exactly what the Tornado it replaced could not do.
- Deep strike
- 2 × Storm Shadow on the inboard wing pylons, 2 × Meteor, 2 × ASRAAM, Litening pod, one centreline tank. Available to the UK, Italy and Saudi Arabia only; the German and Spanish equivalent swaps Storm Shadow for two Taurus KEPD 350 and the British missiles for IRIS-T.
Weapon clearances are national and change from year to year, so this list is a snapshot rather than a specification. It draws on Eurofighter GmbH and MBDA product data, UK Ministry of Defence and RAF releases, Bundeswehr documentation and reporting by FlightGlobal, Janes and Aviation Week. Where a weapon has been fired in trials but not cleared for service — SPEAR 3 is the clearest case — it is described that way.
Variants
Eurofighter built the same aeroplane five times, and called each one a tranche
The Typhoon has no marks in the British sense. It has tranches: production batches contracted years apart by four governments, each one a snapshot of what the partners were willing to fund at the time. The airframe is essentially unchanged across all of them. What changes is the computing, the radar provision and the weapons wiring — which is why a Tranche 1 jet could never be upgraded to carry an AESA radar, and why Britain and Germany both chose to scrap or retire their earliest aircraft rather than modernise them.
The consortium politics that made the programme late also made it durable. Work was divided by national share — Britain 37.5 per cent, Germany 29, Italy 19.5, Spain 14 — with four final assembly lines for one aeroplane, an arrangement no rational engineer would choose and no partner would give up. It added years and billions. It also means four countries have a standing industrial reason to keep buying, which is why the order book grew in the 2020s while most of the Typhoon’s contemporaries were winding down.
- BAe EAP (1986, 1 built)
- The Experimental Aircraft Programme demonstrator, flown on 6 August 1986 after West Germany and Italy withdrew their funding and British Aerospace paid for it largely itself. It proved the canard-delta, relaxed-stability, fly-by-wire configuration that the Typhoon inherited almost unaltered.
- DA1 to DA7 (1994–2005, 7 built)
- The development aircraft, one or two per partner nation. DA1 flew at Manching on 27 March 1994; DA2 reached Mach 2 in December 1997; DA6, a Spanish two-seater, was lost to a double engine flameout in November 2002. Two survive in the RAF Museum and the Italian Air Force Museum.
- Tranche 1 (1998–2008, 148 built)
- The initial production standard: air defence first, with an air-to-ground capability that had to be bolted on later. Britain’s £73 million Change Proposal 193 gave Block 5 aircraft GBU-16 and a Litening pod, creating the FGR4 designation. These airframes cannot take the AESA radar. Britain retired all but four in 2025; Germany is replacing its own with Tranche 4.
- Tranche 2 (2008–2014, 251 built)
- New mission computers with the processing headroom the first batch lacked, and the platform on which the Phase 1, 2 and 3 Enhancement packages were built — Paveway IV, then Meteor and Storm Shadow, then Brimstone. This is the numerical backbone of every European Typhoon fleet, and the reason the RAF’s 2026 decision to upgrade all 107 aircraft rather than only 40 matters so much.
- Tranche 3A (2013–2019, 112 built)
- Wired from the factory for an AESA radar, conformal fuel tanks and improved low-band jamming, with more electrical power and cooling. The Tranche 3B follow-on was never ordered. Kuwait, Qatar and Oman bought to this standard; the RAF’s last Typhoon, ZK437, was delivered on 27 September 2019.
- UK designations: F2, T1, FGR4, T3 (2003 onwards, 160 delivered)
- The RAF took 53 Tranche 1, 67 Tranche 2 and 40 Tranche 3 aircraft. Single-seat F2 became FGR4 on receiving the austere air-to-ground fit in 2008; the two-seat T1 became T3. Sixteen two-seaters were broken up for spares in 2018, each yielding an estimated £50 million in parts.
- Continental designations (2003 onwards)
- Germany, Italy and Spain contract for the aircraft as the EF-2000. Italy operates it as the F-2000A and TF-2000A; Spain as the C.16 and CE.16 Tifón. Austria took 15 Tranche 1 aircraft in 2007 after cutting an order for 18 Tranche 2 — paying more per jet for less aeroplane, in a deal that has generated criminal investigations and litigation ever since.
- Tranche 4 (2020 onwards, 82 on order)
- The current new-build standard, with an AESA radar fitted from the factory: Germany’s 38 aircraft under Project Quadriga (30 single-seat, 8 two-seat, first flight 15 July 2026, deliveries to 2030), Spain’s 20 under Halcón I, and Italy’s 24 ordered in December 2024 for €7.5 billion. Kuwait and Qatar received the ECRS Mk0 radar earlier on Tranche 3 airframes.
- Tranche 5 (2023 onwards, 65 on order)
- Open software architecture and the newest avionics. Spain ordered 25 under Halcón II; Germany added 20 in October 2025 for about €3.75 billion, for delivery between 2031 and 2034 to replace the Tornado ECR; Turkey’s 20 aircraft, ordered the same month for around £8 billion, are to be built at Warton with the ECRS Mk2 radar and delivered after 2030.
- Typhoon EK (2023 onwards, 15 conversions)
- Germany’s electronic-combat conversion, approved by the Bundestag budget committee in November 2023: Saab Arexis jamming pods, wingtip emitter-location receivers and AGM-88E AARGM anti-radiation missiles. It replaces the Tornado ECR from around 2030 and is the only Typhoon variant built for a role the original specification never contemplated.
Tranche totals are approximate: aircraft have moved between batches, orders have been renegotiated, and the partner nations do not all count the same way. Order figures here follow Airbus, BAE Systems, Leonardo and NETMA announcements; delivery figures follow Eurofighter GmbH’s own published running total of about 613 aircraft as of September 2025.
Four decades of the Typhoon
Consortium formed
UK, Germany, Italy and Spain form the Eurofighter consortium; BAe’s EAP demonstrator first flies on 8 August, proving the canard-delta layout.
DA1 flies
The first development aircraft, DA1, flies on 27 March from Manching, Germany.
Production contract
A contract for an initial 620 aircraft is signed; Tranche 1 confirmed.
Service entry
Type acceptance on 30 June; the German Air Force enters service that August, followed by Italy, the UK and Spain.
First export
Austria takes its first Typhoons; Saudi Arabia’s Al Salam deal gets under way.
Combat debut over Libya
RAF Typhoons fly Operation Ellamy (NATO Unified Protector), air-policing then striking ground targets.
Anti-ISIS strikes
RAF Typhoons strike ISIS in Iraq and Syria under Operation Shader with Paveway IV and Brimstone.
AESA and new exports
Captor-E AESA radar flight trials; Kuwait (2016) and Qatar sign export contracts; Meteor enters service.
Still in production
600+ delivered; new Tranche 4/5 orders (Germany, Spain) and a Turkey deal signed via the UK; upgrades continue.
From the flight line: twelve Typhoon stories
The Four-Nation Gamble
How four rival aerospace industries built one fighter.
Read the full story
The Demonstrator That Started It All
EAP: the British prototype that proved the shape.
Read the full story
Unstable On Purpose
Why the Typhoon fights better because it wants to fall apart.
Read the full story
Meteor: Reaching Out
The ramjet missile that redrew the no-escape zone.
Read the full story
Scramble: The QRA Life
Minutes from cockpit to Mach 1.
Read the full story
Baptism Over Libya
2011: the Typhoon goes to war.
Read the full story
The Gulf Order Book
Saudi, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman buy European.
Read the full story
Supercruise
Fast without the fuel-guzzling reheat.
Read the full story
Typhoon vs Rafale
Europe’s two 4.5-gen thoroughbreds.
Read the full story
Eyes Without Emissions
PIRATE: hunting in silence.
Read the full story
Growing an AESA Eye
Captor-E and the “super Typhoon.”
Read the full story
Built To Keep Flying
A 1980s idea still in production in 2026.
Read the full story
The Typhoon in pictures
The Typhoon in motion
Video coming soon — an official Eurofighter display reel is being selected and verified for embedding.
The Typhoon in motion
Megaprojects — one of the most-watched Typhoon films on YouTube.
Where the Typhoon flies
Operators today
Nine air forces fly the Typhoon, and the four that built it still own most of them
Nine air forces fly the Typhoon in front-line service, and the four that built it still hold about three-quarters of the fleet. The programme that was written off in the 1990s as an expensive Cold War leftover is now the busiest fighter production line in Europe, with roughly 613 aircraft delivered and an order book near 761 — larger than it has ever been. Counts below are aircraft on charge with an operational air force, not aircraft airborne on any given day; the difference is substantial everywhere, and the Typhoon’s availability record has been a chronic sore point in Germany and Britain alike.
These are estimates. Many airframes counted on paper are stored, in deep maintenance or awaiting upgrade — Britain lists 107 Tranche 2 and 3 aircraft for modernisation plus four Tranche 1 jets in the Falklands, and Germany reported 138 of 143 in service in March 2025. Kuwait and Qatar are still receiving aircraft, so their figures are the least firm here. Turkey is deliberately excluded: it signed for 20 new-build Tranche 5 aircraft in October 2025 and is acquiring up to 24 second-hand jets from Qatar and Oman, but no confirmed delivery to the Turkish Air Force had been reported at the time of writing. Poland is not a Typhoon customer and never has been — it evaluated the type and bought F-35A and FA-50 instead. Sources: IISS The Military Balance and FlightGlobal World Air Forces, cross-checked against national ministry statements; entries that could not be corroborated are omitted.
Air policing, strike — and a hedged kill record
The Typhoon’s combat career is dominated by air policing and precision strike rather than dogfighting. It made its combat debut over Libya in 2011 (Operation Ellamy), struck ISIS in Iraq and Syria from 2015 (Operation Shader), and stands continuous Quick Reaction Alert across Europe and the Baltic. Saudi Typhoons have reportedly flown strike sorties over Yemen.
The Typhoon has no confirmed air-to-air combat kills; its record is strike and QRA, and operator sortie claims are often undisclosed — treat specific figures cautiously. Compare the combat record of every military aircraft. Figures as of July 2026.
Everything people ask about the Eurofighter Typhoon
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Every fact, checked
- Royal Air Force — Typhoon FGR4Official RAF aircraft page; performance and operational figures.
- MilitarnyiEurofighter surpasses 600 Typhoon deliveries (613 by September 2025).
- GlobalSecurity.orgEurofighter development history: EAP, DA1, tranches and consortium.
- Leonardo (Aeronautics)Eurofighter Typhoon product page — sensors, radar and industrial partners.
- UK Parliament / House of Commons LibraryTyphoon fighter sovereign capability briefing (2025).
- Simple Flying20 years of service: a brief guide to the Eurofighter Typhoon.
- The Defense PostEurofighter Typhoon complete guide (July 2026).
- MiGFlug — Flights & PricesThe genuine military jets you can actually fly today.