Eurofighter Typhoon ISPA3

ISPA3 is the third of the five Instrumented Series Production Aircraft (ISPA) of the Eurofighter Typhoon programme and the only one contributed by Spain. Like the Instrumented Production Aircraft (IPA), the ISPAs are series airframes diverted from the production line, but they carry a lighter telemetry fit: their remit is confined to avionics rather than the flight envelope or heavy weapons. On these airframes the space of the internal gun is used to house recording equipment connected to the fibre-optic bus, and the whole installation is designed so the aircraft can be returned to series standard once the trials are over. Legally the ISPAs belong to the operating nations, which lend them to industry for the duration of the test period, which is why the career of each one ends with delivery to its air force.

Unlike the first two aircraft of the group, the British ISPA1 and the Italian ISPA2, which were Tranche 1 machines, ISPA3 belongs to Tranche 2, as do ISPA4 and ISPA5. Tranche 2 stemmed from the contract signed on 14 December 2004 and brought a complete overhaul of the avionics to the ASAAC standard, with a strict separation between hardware, abstraction layer, operating system (Integrity-178B, common to all mission computers) and applications, together with a MIL-STD-1760E weapons bus with fibre-optic lines and the EJ200 Mk 101 engines. The first Tranche 2 Typhoon, IPA7, flew from Manching on 16 January 2008, and the first series aircraft of that standard was delivered to the Royal Air Force on 10 October 2008. The fact that the last three ISPAs were Tranche 2 aircraft follows from that architecture: since Tranche 2 and 3 are identical in software, whatever is validated on a second-batch ISPA applies to the whole later fleet. The LRI computers from Tranche 2 onwards also carry a USB 2.0 port that allows a training engagement to be recorded without an ACMI pod and analysed after landing, a facility that is useful precisely for evaluating classified systems such as the DASS. Spain, for its part, had been operating the Typhoon since the Ejército del Aire received its first Tranche 1 aircraft on 5 September 2003, so ISPA3 joined an already established fleet.

According to the documentation consulted, ISPA3 was delivered in June 2011 as a Tranche 2 machine and was used for several avionics test campaigns, including the integration of the Litening laser designator pod (LDP), the pod that gives the Typhoon a laser-guided air-to-surface capability. Once those trials were complete the aircraft was restored to series configuration and handed over to the Spanish Air Force in February 2014, so its life as a testbed lasted a little under three years. The timetable matches that of its batch companions: the Italian ISPA4 was used from May 2011 for the PIRATE sensor and inertial navigation and passed to the Aeronautica Militare in January 2014, while the British ISPA5 was built in March 2011 and returned in January 2014.

The sources consulted do not publish the serial or registration of ISPA3, its first-flight date or its assembly plant (although the Spanish industrial partner in the programme is EADS-CASA, today Airbus Defence and Space, with its final assembly line at Getafe, no source states this for this particular aircraft). Nor do they detail which other campaigns, beyond Litening, it carried out during its loan period. These items remain declared gaps until a specific source is found.