Royal connection is Typhoon's secret weapon in the Middle East

Europe's costliest defence procurement project and the bedrock of its military aerospace industry was not supposed to need exporting.

But as defence budgets shrink faster than a jet fighter on the horizon, the idea that Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain can buy enough Typhoon jet fighters to warrant their substantial joint investment is now as good as dead.

Instead, the companies and governments behind Eurofighter's Typhoon are finding the future tied to the discreet selling prowess of the UK's Queen Elizabeth and the choices of the kings, emirs and sultans who fear the spread of instability around the Gulf.

Her Majesty may not have discussed military hardware as she treated Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan - president of the United Arab Emirates and emir of Abu Dhabi - to a carriage ride through Windsor in April, but defence executives and former civil servants say her relationships with and frequent visits to the Gulf's royal rulers are more important in making a deal happen than anyone else's.

It is no coincidence then that since April executives within the Eurofighter consortium of the UK's BAE Systems, pan-European EADS and Italy's Finmeccanica have privately grown far more confident about Typhoon beating its French rival Dassault Aviation's Rafale in the race to help Abu Dhabi double its air force.

In May, the Queen invited King Hamad al-Khalifa of Bahrain to watch equestrian endurance racing at Windsor with her, despite the outcry from human rights activists. Three months later Typhoon added Bahrain to its expanding list of suitors from the region, with the UK government leading early discussions.

The Bahraini talks were the latest in a series of breakthroughs for Typhoon in the Gulf, notably last year's Omani order for 12 jets, the formation of an Anglo-Emirati defence industrial partnership and early chatter about a further Saudi order for 77 jets.

The Gulf and the UK government's bilateral deals there are crucial to the continued production of Typhoon, which the UK alone predicts will eventually cost it £37bn. Economies of scale are proving hard to find as Germany, the UK, Italy and Spain have slashed their own orders and the Eurofighter companies appear incapable of selling the aircraft elsewhere.

Eurofighter has lost every international tender it has bid for over the past decade. Most recently it was beaten by US, Swedish and French aircraft in Switzerland, Japan and India, while its chances of winning the current South Korean tender are dimming.

EADS was responsible for leading those bids, points out Francis Tusa, editor of Defence Analysis.

"The problem they have got with EADS-sponsored bids is that, given Germany [with France, its major shareholder] does not fight wars, Germany is the last place you would look for a security arrangement," he says.

No jet fighter purchase is without politics. Eurofighter's biggest problem is that it is not American and therefore cannot compete with Boeing and Lockheed Martin's promise to countries such as Japan and South Korea of a strategic relationship with the world's only military superpower, analysts say.

<

The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused.

Typhoon has come a long way since it was conceived in the 1970s as a jet fighter capable of defeating Soviet aircraft in air-to-air combat. As the Soviet threat dissipated and the need to attack ground targets grew, Eurofighter adapted. But executives admit losing the Indian tender laid bare that the changes were not happening fast enough.

Rob Hewson, an aviation weapons specialist at industry analysts IHS Jane's, says that some of Typhoon's close competitors carry a more versatile arsenal of weaponry, with missiles ranging from those that penetrate deep into the ground to those whose accuracy make them better at avoiding civilian casualties when ground targets are in towns and cities.

"The reason Typhoon lost in India is that Rafale can actually do so much more and the Indians actually do need to fight a war," he says, noting that the war in Libya, Typhoon's first deployment, showed the limit of its narrow range of air-to-surface weapons.

Analysts say Eurofighter has no time to lose because the growth of al-Qaeda in Yemen, advances in Iran's nuclear programme, and especially the civil wars in Egypt and Syria mean Gulf leaders are looking for fighters they can use right away.

The Queen - valuable as she is to the sales process - is no longer enough. Typhoon's fate will be determined by its European partners' willingness to get the jet fighter battle ready by investing in the weapons and technology they themselves may not need or be able to afford, but their now all-important foreign customers do.

© The Financial Times Limited 2013. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation