Under the Eurofighter’s Hood
Europe’s frontline fighter is a marvel of technology.
- By Carl Posey
- AirSpaceMag.com, May 21, 2012
A pilot's view from the cockpit of a Royal Air Force Typhoon multi role fighter jet.
Crown Copyright
Up close, the Eurofighter Typhoon is an exotic, beautiful machine that seems seamless, as if carved from a single block of a light, grey material. Perhaps because of the whisker-like canards on the nose, it has a faintly feline look.
Behind that intriguing face is a confluence of technology that, as one Typhoon pilot put it, “was science fiction only a few years ago.” Much of the airplane—built jointly by the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Spain—is made of lightweight composite materials, some of it strengthened by a kind of alchemy, in which titanium is spun into the polymer brew.
The digital flight control system, which keeps the airplane friendly despite its wild instability in pitch, is not so much fly-by-wire as fly by light. The torrent of information flows down fiber optic cables.
The cockpit, comfortable and commodious by fast-jet standards, upends the old joke about how British cockpits are put together: you dump all the instruments in a box, give the box a good shake, and voila!, your very own ergonomic slum.
Purged of dials and gauges, the Typhoon’s glass cockpit is a veritable arcade of displays—although perhaps not a cockpit for old men. “For new guys, it’s the easiest thing ever,” says former wing commander Jez Attridge, who now manages the Royal Air Force’s Typhoon fleet. In the Typhoon, he says, “you’re more a battlespace manager than a fighter pilot.”
Twelve buttons in the center-mounted stick, and 12 more on the throttle, played like piccolo stops, let the pilot’s fingers work the systems without coming off the controls. The cockpit was designed by a working group of pilots and engineers, with the idea that the new aircraft would be something you put on, whose wings would be your wings, whose many electronic brains would become extensions of your own—an aircraft in which the boundary between pilot and machine would almost disappear.
To this end, the Typhoon was equipped to understand and respond to its pilot’s simple oral commands through a Direct Voice Input system. The system has a vocabulary of about 200 words and can control a couple of dozen functions—radar mode settings, display and radio-frequency switching, target selection, and the like. As one Typhoon pilot explains, “Anything you do on a computer with a mouse you can do orally.” But the voice system stays non-critical—you don’t tell it wheels down or bombs away, or call guns (Typhoon sports the same 27-mm cannon as the 1970s-era Panavia Tornado, which was built by the U.K., Germany, and Italy.). A pre-recorded template of the pilot’s voice is loaded into the aircraft before a mission, “training” it to understand that pilot’s commands, whether the accent comes from Yorkshire or Valencia.
The line between aviator and aircraft has been further blurred by the introduction of a flight helmet with a sighting system that gives the pilot a kind of Terminator’s-eye-view of the battlespace, along with stereoscopic night vision. Long used by attack-helicopter pilots, this kind of gear is a relatively recent addition to the fixed-wing fighter-pilot’s tool kit. According to Mark Taylor, BAE’s director of combat air support, the helmet is the biggest leap in improving pilots’ situational awareness since the head-up display.
Comments (3)
Your article states: "The line between aviator and aircraft has been further blurred by the introduction of a flight helmet with a sighting system that gives the pilot a kind of Terminator’s-eye-view of the battlespace, along with stereoscopic night vision. Long used by attack-helicopter pilots, this kind of gear is a relatively recent addition to the fixed-wing fighter-pilot’s tool kit." Though I am not competent to debate the technicalities of what the helmet sighting system is able to do and not do, I know that South Africa developed a missile system, the "V3A Kukri," that entered production in 1973. This missile system featured one of the first helmet mounted acquisition systems that allowed the pilot to lock the missile seeker head onto a target that was outside the aircraft's axis. This missile system was integrated into the Mirage F1CZ before the aircraft were delivered to South Africa from France. The system was developed through further phases and was used on various other Mirage and related fighter aircraft in service with the South African Air Force.
To say in your article that "this kind of gear is a relatively recent addition to the fixed-wing fighter-pilot’s tool kit" is therefore not, according to my knowledge historically correct.
Posted by Verlyn Troskie on May 25,2012 | 01:53 PM
I'll add slightly to Verlyn's point. Both Russia and Israel had widely-deployed deployed Helmet-Mounted Displays 20 years ago. After the Berlin Wall fell, (former East) German MiG-29s with HMDs went up against American F-16s in early exercises - and slaughtered them.
It was a big wake-up call.
The Americans soon learned how to cope with HMD-equipped MiG-29s, by exploiting the relative aerodynamic advantages of their F-16s at certain flight speeds and in certain maneuver types. They didn't forget the lesson, though, and HMDs soon became very popular retrofits and companion buys.
Israel's DASH was developed into the JHMCS HMD by a partnership between Elbit Systems and Rockwell Collins. It's used by F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s, including wide use by the American military, and is probably the most common deployed HMD in the world. It was deep into development and testing by 2001, and began full deployment around 2003. Meanwhile, its DASH predecessor has been upgraded and fitted to F-16s, F-15s, and many other platforms besides.
Over the last decade or so, most fighter buys have included Helmet Mounted Displays of one kind or another. Modern short range air to air missiles make HMDs even more effective, by widening the missile's "seeker cone" well past the MiG-29/AA-11 combination's 45 degrees. The most modern missiles like the British ASRAAM, Israeli Python-5, and American AIM-9X-2s also add datalinks that will let pilots "look and launch" at targets headed "over the shoulder," and even hit enemies behind them.
-- Joe Katzman, Defense Industry Daily
Posted by Joe Katzman on June 29,2012 | 02:54 PM
These advantages aren't insurmountable, but they do make short-range dogfights much more dangerous for everyone. It's fair to say that with this equipment on hand, "Top Gun" would have been a much shorter movie:
Maverick: "OK, I'm about to hit the airbrake. Hang on!"
Goose: "Negative, Mav. Don't worry, I just got him."
Maverick: "What? Jester's dead?!?"
Goose: "Jester's dead, Mav."
Maverick: "But he was behind us!"
Goose: "Two words, Mav: data link. And you were having so much fun back there."
Maverick: "I never get to hit the airbrake!"
Goose: "Another one bites the dust, Mav. Now, if you don't mind, I have Meg Ryan waiting at home for me...."
The Eurofighter's cockpit has always been good, but HMDs are a very recent addition, and aren't widely deployed yet by Eurofighter customers. That has been a big disadvantage for the type, and until they are deployed, the Eurofighter will have to take an old page from the USAF. Its pilots will need to use its relative maneuvering advantages against specific aircraft types, in order to stay out of the cone of enemy HMD shots. Fortunately for them, air-to-air combat has always been one of the type's design strengths.
-- Joe Katzman, Defense Industry Daily
Posted by Joe Katzman on June 29,2012 | 02:54 PM