RAF fighter numbers heading to record low

BRITAIN’S fighter aircraft fleet is to shrink to its smallest in the RAF’s history as ageing jets are retired by the end of the decade, a new analysis warns.

Numbers will be squeezed to only around 127 front-line combat jets at best, under current plans to retire Britain’s Tornado GR4s and early model Typhoons in 2019 before new F35 stealth fighters arrive.

Defence chiefs have already warned that the RAF’s fast-jet fleet is stretched to the limit, and the new analysis from IHS Jane’s warns that it is “perverse” to cut numbers further.

The RAF’s 87 remaining Tornados and 53 tranche 1 Typhoons are scheduled to retire in 2019. By then, only 15 to 20 of the new F35B jump jets will have arrived, according to the analysis. The resulting fleet will be “the lowest number that the RAF will have fielded since its creation in 1918”.

The RAF’s reduced fighter fleet will be made up of technically advanced planes, but “no aircraft, no matter how capable, can be in more than one place at any time”, said Gareth Jennings, aviation desk editor at Jane’s. RAF chiefs have already told David Cameron they are struggling to provide enough fast jets to protect UK airspace, patrol the Falklands, bolster Nato flights in Eastern Europe and fly strike missions over Iraq.

The analysis says that with those threats unlikely to be resolved any time soon, “the further loss of UK air power at such a precarious time as this seems somewhat perverse”.

Gen Sir Nick Houghton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, used an air power conference in London last week to warn how thinly stretched the RAF is. He said the RAF was now at “the very limits of fast-jet availability and capacity”.

BAE Systems, which makes the Typhoon, and many defence leaders are lobbying for the MoD to fill the gap by upgrading the tranche 1 Typhoon to keep it flying through the next decade.