Eurofighter Typhoon IPA9

IPA9 is the single-seater with serial number SS051 built by EADS in Spain and designated as an Instrumented Production Aircraft (IPA), the category of production-standard airframes that the Eurofighter programme diverts from the assembly line and fits with telemetry and flight-test instrumentation in order to develop and validate systems before they reach the operational fleets. Unlike the development prototypes, an IPA is a production aircraft in every respect, which allows test teams to fly on an airframe as close as possible to what customers receive. Within that family, IPA9 is the most recent Spanish contribution and operates from the Airbus Defence facilities in Getafe, where the company has built, tested and delivered every Eurofighter for the Spanish Air Force. In the Spanish military register it carries the serial C.16-70, and it has been photographed with the unit code 14-28 at Albacete air base, home of Ala 14, reflecting its dual status as an industry test aircraft and an airframe belonging to the national fleet.

Its existence adds a ninth aircraft to an IPA fleet that reference sources usually describe as shorter: the most widely quoted list stops at the German IPA8, dedicated to the Captor-E radar, and one of the tables consulted does not even reach that eighth aircraft. That discrepancy is worth bearing in mind when reading programme counts, which in many cases do not include the later additions made by the partner nations.

The episode that gives IPA9 a history of its own came on 29 November 2024, when it took off from Getafe on its first flight with the ECRS Mk0 electronically scanned radar fitted in the nose. It was the first Spanish Eurofighter to fly with this family of active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, intended for the 20 aircraft of the first batch of the Halcón programme, under which Spain is renewing its combat fleet and replacing its EF-18 Hornets. The contractual background dates back to 2020, when Spain and Germany signed contracts to acquire 115 Captor-E radars to equip their Tranche 2 and Tranche 3 Eurofighters and newly built aircraft; five of those were for Spain, for as many Tranche 3 aircraft, and the rest for Germany. Spain later acquired a further 20 radars as part of the equipment for the first Halcón batch, and it is precisely that integration that IPA9 began to validate in flight.

The radar IPA9 flew is an early example, still lacking all the features of the production model, hence the Mk0 designation. The Mk0 is the baseline version jointly developed by Hensoldt, Indra and Leonardo and integrated into the Eurofighter fleets of Kuwait and Qatar. The set installed in the aircraft is expected to be updated during the test campaign to bring it closer to the Mk1 standard, and the trials are later planned to be repeated with a true ECRS Mk1. That Mk1, developed by Hensoldt and Indra for the German Eurofighters of the Quadriga programme and the Spanish aircraft of the Halcón programme, features a multi-channel receiver, a wider field of regard, improved target recognition and an enhanced detection range, along with electronic warfare capabilities; it will also be retrofitted to older Luftwaffe aircraft. Technically, the ECRS Mk1 is the latest evolution of the line that began with the ECR90 radar, itself derived from the Ferranti Blue Vixen that equipped the Royal Navy's Sea Harriers from the nineties onwards, although the successive evolutions have left little or nothing of the original design. In parallel, in September 2024 the United Kingdom had flown the ECRS Mk2 for the first time on a Royal Air Force Typhoon, so the IPA9 flight made Spain the second partner to put a new-generation E-Scan radar in the air on a test aircraft of its own.

The role of IPA9 is therefore that of a flying test bed for the radar that will define the multi-role, air-to-air and air-to-surface capability of the next generation of Spanish Eurofighters: the ECRS Mk1 will allow the aircraft to track nearby targets while continuing to scan the airspace hundreds of kilometres away for other threats, even in environments with heavy electronic jamming. Beyond its serial number, its registration and this radar test campaign, the available sources publish neither the date of its first flight as an aircraft nor details of any other campaigns to which it has been assigned, so the rest of its record remains to be documented.