Eurofighter Typhoon Tranche 3 / 3A

The Eurofighter Typhoon's third production batch was originally conceived as a single order of 236 airframes, but budget pressure in the four partner nations and almost two years of negotiation forced it into two unequal halves: a Tranche 3A of 112 aircraft and a Tranche 3B of 124 that was never signed. The Tranche 3A contract was concluded on 31 July 2009 and covered, besides the airframes, 241 EJ200 turbofans. The national split was 40 aircraft for the United Kingdom, 31 for Germany, 21 for Italy and 20 for Spain; in the British case those 40 machines were held to discharge the country's obligations to the programme in full, after the cost overruns accumulated until then. Germany had taken its own step a few weeks earlier: on 17 June 2009 the Bundestag budget committee approved the 3A sub-tranche with its 31 aircraft, at a price that put the system cost at roughly 90 million euros per aircraft.

Tranche 3B was in doubt from the outset. Completing it would have required Germany to find some 3 billion euros more for its remaining 37 aircraft, and in October 2011 the federal defence minister announced that they would not be ordered; Italy and the United Kingdom had already given notice that they were giving up their own shares. That same autumn EADS went as far as formally proposing to the partners that the Tranche 3B orders be cancelled in exchange for concentrating the effort on export campaigns. Spain, which had considered 24 aircraft from that second half to replace its F/A-18s, did not order them either. The gap would not be filled until well into the following decade, and then only through later batches built to different standards, so Tranche 3A effectively closed the production line for the four founding nations.

Technically, Tranche 3 is not a leap in capability but a leap in preparation: the aircraft were delivered at the operational standard already reached by Tranche 2, yet with the structure and interfaces needed to grow. Around 350 parts were reworked. The upper fuselage was strengthened with the mountings for conformal fuel tanks (CFT), visible as small bulges: two tanks of 1,500 litres each, developed by BAE Systems to extend range by about 25 per cent without the aerodynamic penalty of the 1,000-litre underwing drop tanks. The nose was likewise reinforced to carry the heavier CAPTOR-E radar, and the fuel dumping system was moved beneath the wings. To that were added fibre-optic cabling, a mission computer upgrade and improvements to the DASS Praetorian defensive suite; on the electronic warfare side the work concentrated on raising radiated jamming power through antenna modifications, with a digital receiver and band coverage extended down towards low VHF frequencies.

Radar is the point that best sums the variant up. The partner nations' Tranche 3A aircraft left the factory with the mechanically scanned CAPTOR-M, but wired and sized to receive an active array. It was the export Tranche 3As that introduced the capability: the Kuwaiti and Qatari machines were built with the Captor-E / ECRS Mk0 active electronically scanned array, the Kuwaiti batch being the first production aircraft to receive it on the assembly line. In the United Kingdom the work led to the ECRS Mk2, built by Leonardo UK in Edinburgh and aimed precisely at Britain's Tranche 3 Typhoons; in January 2024 it was announced that the first set had been fitted to ZK355 (BS116), an RAF test and evaluation aircraft, at BAE Systems' Warton site. Italy later joined the Mk2 development, while for Tranche 2 the RAF left a possible later upgrade open.

As with earlier batches, production was subdivided into capability blocks. Block 20 corresponds to the third step of enhanced operational capability (EOC 3) and brings the ability to carry the conformal tanks; Block 25 corresponds to phase A of the P2E package, whose contract was signed in 2013 and itself divided into P2EA and P2EB, opening the way to the Meteor air-to-air missile and to the Storm Shadow/SCALP and KEPD Taurus stand-off weapons.

The first production Tranche 3 example made its maiden flight on 2 December 2013 from BAE Systems' Warton plant in Lancashire. Deliveries then ran on through the rest of the decade: the United Kingdom took its last aircraft up to 4 October 2019, completing 160 Typhoons of which 40 belonged to Tranche 3; Germany closed its quota of 31 in December 2019, within a national total of 143; Spain received its final Tranche 3A in 2019; and Italy did so in 2020, with 21 aircraft of this batch out of 96 ordered. One of the Spanish aircraft of the batch, C.16-69 of Escuadrón 142, Ala 14, was lost in an accident on 12 October 2017.

The Tranche 3 standard was also the one offered for export throughout the decade. Saudi Arabia signed a contract on 17 September 2007 for 72 aircraft, 24 of them to Tranche 2 standard and the remaining 48 assembled in Saudi facilities to Tranche 3 standard, with deliveries from 2011. Oman ordered twelve aircraft on 21 December 2012 — nine single-seaters and three two-seaters — with the mechanically scanned CAPTOR-M radar and deliveries from 2017. Kuwait signed a contract with Leonardo on 5 April 2016 worth 7.957 billion euros (9.062 billion dollars) for 28 aircraft, 22 single-seat and 6 twin-seat, all to Tranche 3 standard and the first to carry the Captor-E from new; the first two arrived in Kuwait on 14 December 2021. Qatar ordered 24 aircraft on 17 September 2017, also with AESA radar. In 2020 Airbus offered fifteen Tranche 3 Typhoons — twelve single-seaters and three two-seaters — to the Colombian Air Force, and in October 2025 the Turkish president expressed an interest in acquiring Qatar's 24 used Tranche 3A aircraft.