Eurofighter Typhoon ISPA2

ISPA2 was the second of the Eurofighter programme's Instrumented Series Production Aircraft (ISPA): production airframes diverted from the assembly line and fitted with test instrumentation so that avionics modifications could be evaluated without tying up the development aircraft or the seven Instrumented Production Aircraft (IPA). Unlike the IPAs, the ISPAs carry a lighter telemetry fit and use the internal gun bay to house test equipment plugged into the aircraft's fibre-optic bus; the installation is reversible, so that once its task is complete the aircraft is returned to series standard and handed to the air force that legally owns it. The consortium operated five such aircraft spread among the partner nations: ISPA1 (United Kingdom, a Tranche 1 two-seater), ISPA2 (Italy), ISPA3 (Spain), ISPA4 (Italy) and ISPA5 (United Kingdom).

The Italian aircraft is the single-seat production airframe with production number IS001 and construction number 038, assembled by Alenia Aeronautica at its Turin-Caselle plant. During trials it flew under the provisional serial CSX7235 (MMX7235 in factory usage) before receiving its definitive military serial, MM7235. It was Italy's first production single-seat F-2000A: Italian production had opened with the two-seater IT001, which had made its first flight at Caselle on 14 February 2003.

ISPA2 took off for the first time on 9 July 2004 from Caselle, flown by Maurizio Cheli, Alenia's chief test pilot and a former astronaut, who two years earlier had taken IPA2 on its maiden flight and who in 2003 had become famous for racing Michael Schumacher's Ferrari down the runway at Grosseto. The flight came less than two months after the first ISPA, the British BT005, had flown at Warton on 11 May 2004, and in the same summer in which IPA5 began its avionics trials.

The task assigned to ISPA2 was the flight evaluation of the Microwave Landing System (MLS), one of the navigation aids planned to round out the Typhoon's suite alongside TACAN and precision DME. It was a bounded campaign: whereas ISPA1 stayed for years with the combined industry-customer test team to integrate the DASS self-protection suite, the helmet and the laser designator pod, the Italian aircraft completed its trials within months. In December 2004 it was returned to series configuration and delivered to the Aeronautica Militare, barely five months after its first flight. That tempo matched where the programme stood in Italy: on 16 March 2004 the first Eurofighter of the 4° Stormo had landed at Grosseto, the first Italian operational unit to receive the type.

As a production aircraft, MM7235 joined Italy's Tranche 1 fleet with the unit code 4-13 and was assigned to the 904° Gruppo Efficienza Aeromobili of the 4° Stormo. Tranche 1 aircraft, whose production began in 2003 with the Typhoon's initial capability, were upgraded from early 2012 to the Block 5 standard, the most complete of the first batch. Its time in the test programme was so brief that by late 2008, when the consortium's test fleet passed 6,000 flight hours, that fleet consisted of six IPAs and a single ISPA, the British ISPA1. The later instrumented aircraft (ISPA3, ISPA4 and ISPA5, Tranche 2 airframes delivered in 2011) and the ISPA6 used by Leonardo from 2019 for the electronically scanned radar in Kuwaiti configuration followed the same pattern of temporary use established by ISPA1 and ISPA2.

The sources consulted do not record the outcome of the MLS campaign or the number of flights made during the trials period; both points remain to be documented.