When did the Eurofighter come out?

The need arose in the early 1980s, and in 1986 the partner nations set up the Eurofighter consortium. France pulled out the following year to build the Rafale. A British demonstrator, the EAP, flew in 1986 to test the delta-wing-with-canards formula and digital controls. The end of the Cold War nearly sank the program: Germany wanted to withdraw in 1992 over its cost, and it was only saved after capabilities were scaled back and the workshare renegotiated. With that delay, the first prototype, DA1, took off from Manching on 27 March 1994 with Peter Weger at the controls, and the British DA2 flew ten days later at Warton.

Seven development aircraft and several production instrumentation aircraft racked up years of testing before the 1998 production contract, the year the aircraft received the export name Typhoon. The first Tranche 1 deliveries took place in 2003, and the Luftwaffe, the RAF, the Aeronautica Militare and the Ejército del Aire began training pilots that same year. The RAF declared it ready for air policing in 2007 and for ground attack in 2008. In Spain, Wing 11 at Morón was the first unit to operate it, and Wing 14 at Albacete received it from 2010.

Tranches 2 and 3 added air-to-ground capability, the electronically scanned Captor-E radar, the Meteor missile, and a structure prepared for conformal fuel tanks. The most recent orders, Germany's Tranche 4 and Spain's Halcón batches, will keep the production line open until the end of this decade, while its successor is defined under the FCAS program. More than 600 units ordered by nine countries and two decades in service have made the Typhoon the most numerous European-built fighter (as of September 2026).