The seesaw flight of Western fighter jets

Abhijit Bhattacharyya

Author and Columnist

THE fortunes of fighter jet makers in the West are waxing and waning. Whereas the US aviation is in the ‘vertical Charlie’ mode, symbolising the success of its homemade fighter aircraft, Europe is on the ‘down Charlie’ flight path. The latter implies that the aircraft is hurtling towards the earth and a split-second error of judgment could be fatal, like what happened on India’s Air Force Day on October 8, 1989, when a brand-new Mirage-2000 from the No. 1 Tiger Squadron crashed at New Delhi’s Palam Air Force Station.

It’s time to examine the big picture of the fighter jets of the West. This is undoubtedly a bread-and-butter subject for the Indian Air Force (IAF) because for several decades it has flown European fighter jets and never an American combat aircraft. From the UK’s de Havilland Vampire, Hunter and Sea Harrier to France’s Ouragon, Mystere, Mirage-2000 and Rafale, a variety of Russian MiGs and Sukhois and Anglo-French SEPECAT Jaguar, the combat missions of the IAF must have by now logged millions of flying hours.

Barring the French aviation industry, Europe’s fighter makers, including the UK and Germany, have largely vanished from the radar. All are part of a multinational consortium to make fighters. Germany is in the team of Panavia Tornado and now Eurofighter, and the UK plans to tie up with Japan and Italy to make ‘Tempest’, the ‘concept to commissioning’ of which is surely going to take a decade, if not more. Meanwhile, Israel is 100 per cent US-dependent, as all of its ‘345 combat capable’ fighters are US-made F-15, F-16 and F-35.

Clearly, the US has monopolised the European combat craft market through NATO’s ‘collective security club’. From F-16 of the 1970s to the F-35 fighter of the 21st century, America has shown remarkable resilience to hold on to the pole position in manufacturing and marketing. Yet, signs of fighter fatigue can’t be ruled out due to an unforeseen situation emerging from beyond the horizon or beyond the visual-range flight path of the flying machines coming out of sprawling manufacturing facilities of California, Texas and Washington.

Undoubtedly, though, the fighter has been the forte of the US military industrial complex since the end of World War I, it received a boost during World War II. There were European rivals and competitors vying for a piece of the pie, but they surrendered before the US juggernaut. Thus, the emergence of a single machine market of US fighters and the gradual retreat-to-rout (except France and a struggling Sweden) of Europe is too stark to be missed. No European nation today, therefore, is in a position to go solo to invest in state-of-the-art fighter aircraft research and development and enter the market without sales guarantee.

For that matter, even the vaunted F-35 of US-based Lockheed Martin is feeling the financial pinch for going solo now. F-35 has become a US-led multinational enterprise. This, after the US rose to suppress all non-American aviation companies in terms of research, development, design and marketing to monopolise the fighter market in an unabashed quest for profit and power. Things began moving in the 1970s and gained momentum after the 1991 collapse of the once-mighty USSR. The pendulum of competitive world aviation, in one stroke, swung towards the competition-bashing, monopolistic combat and civil aircraft manufacturing of Washington.

Thus, the saga of F-16 fighter induction from the 1970s, courtesy of the herd mentality of the West, has a bittersweet story of its own because of Pentagon’s remorseless rooting for the aircraft which easily eclipsed all rivals and competitors, such as France’s Dassault and Sweden’s Saab. In fact, the entire US defence establishment played so hard that then US President Gerald Ford had to visit Brussels to attend a NATO meeting and he made it a point to raise the F-16 deal with then Belgian PM Leo Tindemans. As the Belgians succumbed, a dismayed and defeated Dassault executive asked an American: “Could you imagine us using our President as a salesman?”

Be that as it may, the success of salesmanship in the arms bazaar changed forever in 1975, especially for a military alliance like NATO. The US took refuge in the convenient military jargon of ‘standardisation and inter-operability’ of equipment (fighters) by NATO in the times of conflict.

Of course, the US could relentlessly and successfully make a connection between commercial and diplomatic choices because of a fundamental flaw in the European approach — the birth of an uncharacteristic reluctance to build up its own independent defence force, which resulted in a failure to defend, upgrade and expand an existing in-house aviation industry. Except France, after World War II, Europe took the US for granted as its sole defendant. The result? When the US F-16 fighter was selected for the collective inventory of NATO in 1975, the key to the future of Western aerospace industry shifted to Texas, California and Washington. Paris and Stockholm were left way behind.

The outcome of this tectonic shift is there for all to see. To date, 4,600 F-16s have been ordered and are in use, thereby making them arguably the bestseller fighters of the world, in service with more than 30 air forces. The successor to F-16, Lockheed Martin F-35, too, is making rapid strides, but the danger signs are looming large. Sophisticated technology and multi-mission apparatus of the fighter, at times, seem to be failing to gel with the man behind the machine during a live mission. It’s a lesson for all, including the IAF, which is woefully short of its operational squadron strength. Instead of banking on imported fighters from Europe (except France) with chronic cost and time overrun issues, India should take matters into its own hands, the way ISRO has done in the space domain.

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