Eurofighter Typhoon DA6

DA6 was the sixth of the seven Development Aircraft that the Eurofighter consortium shared out among its four partner industries, and the one allotted to Spain. It was built by CASA at its Getafe plant outside Madrid and carried the military test serial XCE.16-01, foreshadowing the CE.16 designation the Spanish Air Force would later give its production two-seat Typhoons. It was the first two-seat Eurofighter to fly: the maiden flight took place on 31 August 1996 from Getafe with Alfonso de Miguel, CASA's Director of Flight Operations, at the controls. It joined the programme more than two years after the German DA1 and the British DA2, and did so with avionics, flight-control and utility-control systems already upgraded compared with the early prototypes; the second two-seater, the British DA4, would not fly until March 1997.

Within the flight-test task allocation DA6 was assigned two-seat avionics and systems, complementing DA4, which concentrated on two-seat handling and radar. In June 1997 it appeared in the static park at the Paris Salon, and during 1998 it completed a series of trials to prove operability in hot climates; by mid-August of that year it had logged 106 sorties and just over 96 flying hours out of the 909 sorties and 744 hours then accumulated by the whole development fleet. On 9 June 1999 the Chief of Staff of the Hellenic Air Force, Lt Gen Litzerakos, flew it at Getafe during the sales campaign aimed at Greece, and later that year the aircraft underwent further high-temperature testing. In February and March 2000 it was moved to DERA Boscombe Down in the United Kingdom for the environmental hangar and the blower tunnel: in the former it was exposed to extreme ranges of temperature and humidity, and in the latter realistic icing conditions were produced on the ground ahead of in-flight icing trials. In early December 2000 it completed a modification programme in which its radar and avionics were updated and a new release of the flight-control software was installed. On 6 September 2001 the Chief of the Luftwaffe Air Staff, Lt Gen Gerhard Back, made a 55-minute flight in its rear seat from Manching with German test pilot Heinz Spölgen in front; by then the seven development aircraft had jointly exceeded 1,400 hours in 1,750 flights.

On 21 November 2002 DA6 became the Eurofighter programme's first loss. It had taken off from Getafe some fifteen minutes earlier for a test flight over the Toledo region and was in straight and level flight at 45,000 ft and Mach 0.7 when, while stabilising for a test point, both engines surged and flamed out. The crew — Eduardo Cuadrado, EADS-CASA chief test pilot, and Ignacio Lombo, a Spanish Air Force test pilot — tried to relight the engines without success and ejected unhurt; according to the German source the resulting hydraulic failure left the aircraft uncontrollable. It came down in open countryside near the village of Belvís de la Jara in Toledo province, about 110 km south-west of Madrid, and was destroyed; it was fully instrumented, which aided the investigation. The German source counts it as the aircraft's 323rd flight, with 362 missions and roughly 325-326 flying hours logged. On 12 December 2002 the Spanish accident investigation committee attributed the loss to the two early-development EJ200 engines fitted (03A standard), two of only three of that standard left in the programme, and the consortium stressed that the failure could not recur with production engines. Flight testing resumed on 11 December 2002 and, from 8 April 2003, the German DA1 was transferred to Spain to fill the gap left by DA6.