Turkish Typhoon deal edges closer?
August 16, 2024
Turkish Chief of the General Staff, General Metin Gürak, recently visited the UK’s Strategic Command (previously Joint Forces Command) and, on 9 August, RAF Coningsby, where he posed for photographs in front of a No.12 Squadron Eurofighter Typhoon. On Monday 12 August, Yaşar Güler, Türkiye’s Minister of National Defence reaffirmed Turkey’s interest in the Eurofighter. The Minister expressed the hope that the Eurofighter partners (and particularly Germany) would give a positive response to Türkiye’s request. He acknowledged that little progress has been made so far.
Even before Türkiye was ejected from the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme, there was some Turkish interest in the Eurofighter Typhoon. Procurement of the Block 70 Lockheed Martin F-16 was initially accorded a more urgent priority, however.
In November 2023, even before the F-16 deal was approved, Türkiye confirmed its interest in also acquiring 40 Eurofighter Typhoons, and reportedly entered negotiations with Britain and Spain.
Germany, one of the Eurofighter consortium’s original ‘partner nations’, has reportedly opposed a sale to Turkey. In July 2024, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Chancellor Olaf Scholz to lift the German block on the Eurofighter Typhoon sale.
Türkiye is understood to want the Typhoon to restore its qualitative advantage over Greece in the Aegean, following the Greek acquisition of the Dassault Rafale F3R. The Typhoon has an advantage over the Rafale in Beyond Visual Range (BVR) combat capability, enjoying a higher top speed, faster supersonic acceleration, better supersonic agility, a higher service ceiling and a faster climb rate, albeit with a slightly inferior air to ground weapons load.
At the recent Farnborough Airshow, Eurofighter CEO Giancarlo Mazzanatto, said that he had “met many Turkish officials in the last two or three months. So I’m joking about the fact that I’m making now a sort of collection of the business cards of the ambassadors from Türkiye in Italy, in the UK, in Germany. They are all coming to see me. Yesterday, it was the ambassador of Turkey in the UK, but it was previously the other two and they’re all giving the same message. They are all coming to me and saying, “Help us with the Germans. We want, we want, we want to buy Typhoon! The message is very clear and very consistent.
Asked what the issue was, Mazzanatto said: “You need to ask the German the German government. There are a number of political issues. There are parties in the coalition that is running Germany now, that are resistant to that. I hope that this is going to change, but on this, I don’t have firsthand information. There is certainly a political lobby.”
