The German Air Force conducted flight tests of its newest Meteor air — to-air missile. According to Defense News, the military decided that the ammunition is ready for integration with Eurofighter Typhoon fighters.
The Typhoon multi-purpose fighter was developed in the nineties. With a length of 15.6 meters and a height of 5.3 meters, its wingspan is 10.9 meters. The fighter can reach a speed of 2.5 thousand kilometers per hour. The maximum take-off weight of the aircraft is 23.5 tons, and its combat radius is 1.4 thousand kilometers. Now the German Typhoon is armed with AIM — 120 AMRAAM air-to-air guided missiles with a range of up to 75 kilometers and IRIS-T missiles of the same class, but with a range of 25 kilometers.
The European company MBDA has been developing the Meteor rocket since 1997 for France, Great Britain, Sweden, Germany, Spain and Italy. The missile has a range of 200 kilometers, a length of about 3.7 meters, and it weighs about 180 kilograms. Thanks to the ramjet engine, Meteor can maintain a high flight speed along the entire trajectory. [...] The upgraded Swedish JAS-39C/D Gripen fighters were the first to receive the missile.
180 kg schwer, über 3 Meter lang und eine der modernsten Raketen der Welt: #Meteor . Erstmals sind zwei #Eurofighter vom #Team_Luftwaffe des #TLG74 aus Neuburg mit dem Lenkflugkörper abgehoben. Mehr hier: https://t.co/v0DS76cC0r #Sicherheit im #Luftraum pic.twitter.com/0M1ZppBqF1
— Team_Luftwaffe (@Team_Luftwaffe) August 2, 2021
The German Air Force conducted initial tests of the Typhoon with Meteor missiles in June at the Newberg Air Base. They involved two aircraft and they did not include live firing. According to the results of the exercises, the German military decided that Meteor is ready to integrate with all Typhoon fighters, with the exception of their old Tranche-4 models.
In the future, the German Air Force will replace the Typhoon with a new generation fighter, which we wrote about earlier. It will be adopted in the 2040s.
Vasilisa Chernyavtseva
