Quote: BillyRhino "4 months on, and with the top brass falling out amongst themselves on the sustainability of this latest escapade by the Boy David, I wondered how the projected £1 billion plus costs were going to be met.
This from SKY News......
Three of the RAF’s most advanced fighter jets are being used for spare parts because of a crippling shortage, Waste Watch can reveal.
The Typhoons – worth more than £360m between them – have been grounded at a time when the planes are carrying out air strikes over Libya.
Although the Ministry of Defence has admitted to the practise, this is the first revelation of how many fighter jets are currently being cannibalised for parts.
Tory MP Chris Heaton-Harris discovered three Typhoons, worth around £120m each, were grounded in March this year (the latest figures available) when he asked a written question in Parliament.
He said
Nothing new here. The Typhoon is an expensive mistake as discussed on the Wilf Rosenberg thread. It was designed as a pure fighter for the cold war senarios. Now pure fighters are almost obsolete and as the Typhoon still has a very limited ground attack capability it was not worth training the pilots for this purpose as the aircraft best suited to this is the Tornado GR4 with its 2 man crew etc etc. which has completed 1000s of successful missions on military targets in Libya.
A few weeks ago the Typhoon made its ground attack world debut in a combat situation in Libya yet needed a Tornado to fly alongside and do the targeting and follow through.
The Typhoon is a very expensive aircraft with high spec that has spent most of its life on the ground because of many technical problems with the pilots not getting enough flying hours in to qualify for combat. These problems have been inherited by "call be Dave" from the previous backstabbing administration of Mr "Bliar" and Mr "no more boom and bust" Brown
