Eurofighter Typhoon on Libya operations

Com­ments from Wing Com­man­der JJ Attridge, RAF – Oper­a­tion Ellamy,

Typhoon Detach­ment Commander.

At the 2011 Roy­al Inter­na­tion­al Air Tat­too, in Fair­ford, UK, the Roy­al Air Force held a media brief­ing on oper­a­tions in Libya. Some of the key points from the brief­ing have been sum­marised below: 
“I’ve now com­plet­ed 30 sor­ties in sup­port of Unit­ed Nations [Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil Res­o­lu­tion] 1973, with an aver­age sor­tie length of 5 hours, so I feel qual­i­fied to say that the Typhoon has come of age.  In just over 3 months we’ve flown almost 1300 hours, the same as a Typhoon cir­cum­nav­i­gat­ing the Earth 24 times. 

Although, this isn’t to take the focus from Typhoon’s oper­a­tional his­to­ry: it is on duty 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on Quick Reac­tion Alert in the UK and the Falklands. 

How­ev­er, Typhoon’s rapid deploy­ment to Gioia del Colle air base in Italy, 72 hours from the ini­tial UN man­date and sub­se­quent first mis­sion on Oper­a­tion ODYSSEY DAWN 12 hours lat­er, are tes­ta­ment to the deploy­a­bil­i­ty and rel­e­vance of this new gen­er­a­tion aircraft. 

More impres­sive has been the re-rolling of Typhoon and its pilots from an air-to-air air­craft to an air-to-ground fighter-bomber.

“From a pilot’s per­spec­tive, the air­craft is spec­tac­u­lar. Despite spend­ing on aver­age 7 hours in the cock­pit per mis­sion you could not find a more com­fort­able air­craft to fly.  The cock­pit is large by fast-jet stan­dards and the infor­ma­tion from the radar, DASS and LINK-16 is dis­played eas­i­ly and acces­si­bly. This allows you to func­tion at 100% capa­bil­i­ty through­out the sor­tie, not plagued by fatigue or a lack of sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness.  Due to the aircraft’s huge excess pow­er it enables the flight from Gioia to Libya, some 650 miles, to take just over an hour, cruis­ing at 40 000 feet, 0.9 mach, even with a war load of 4 Enhanced Pave­way II 1000 lb bombs, a Liten­ing III Tar­get­ing POD, AMRAAM and ASRAAM missiles.

“Over­all, I’ve been for­tu­nate to over­see the mat­u­ra­tion of the RAF’s first mul­ti-role com­bat air­craft since World War II.  More than that, as a Ser­vice we’ve been for­tu­nate to have at our dis­pos­al an air­craft that ful­fils the RAF’s mantra of being agile, adapt­able and capa­ble; as an Amer­i­can air­man said to me, ‘that’s a lot of bang for the buck’.  This is rein­forced by the fact that the aver­age hours flown per air­craft dur­ing this oper­a­tion have increased from 24 to near­ly 90 per month, which demon­strates the platform’s stun­ning serviceability. 

Togeth­er with the Tor­na­do GR‑4, Typhoon has enabled the UK to meet its com­mit­ment to the UN-man­dat­ed Libyan no-fly zone whilst still pro­vid­ing Air Defence of the UK and its dependencies.”

Below can be found some Oper­a­tion Ellamy data shown at the brief­ing, relat­ed to the com­bined fleet of RAF Tor­na­do and Typhoon