What is the Eurofighter?

The program began in the 1980s, when several European countries were looking for a replacement for the F-4 Phantom and the Tornado ADV. In 1986, Eurofighter Jagdflugzeug GmbH was set up in Munich, with work shared in proportion to each nation's orders: Germany and Spain through what is now Airbus Defence and Space, the United Kingdom through BAE Systems, and Italy through Leonardo. The EJ200 engines are produced by Eurojet, another consortium of the same countries. Each partner assembles its own aircraft on a final assembly line: the Spanish one is in Getafe.

It is a twin-engine aircraft with a delta wing and forward canards, aerodynamically unstable by design and controlled by a digital fly-by-wire system that gives it remarkable agility. It reaches Mach 2 and can sustain supersonic flight without afterburner in a lightweight configuration. Although conceived as an interceptor, successive "Tranches" have added air-to-ground capability with guided bombs and cruise missiles, the Captor-E active electronically scanned array radar, and the long-range Meteor missile. Its external load is distributed across thirteen hardpoints.

The first production aircraft were delivered to the four founding nations in 2003. Spain operates it with Wing 11 at Morón and Wing 14 at Albacete, and has ordered new batches (the Halcón program) to replace the F-18s at Canary Islands and Zaragoza. Austria, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar round out the list of export customers, with more than 600 units ordered in total (as of September 2026). Eurofighters regularly take part in NATO air policing missions over the Baltic and the Black Sea.