Buy now, fly later
I SUPPOSE there must have been a time when people went along to the Farnbor- ough Air Show, saw a nice new aeroplane and bought one to take home. It is different now. Prices have gone up and so have deliv- ery times. If the Eurofighter took your fancy you would need the wealth of a mogul and the patience of a saint. This nippy little plane is now supposed to reach the Royal Air Force early in the next mil- lennium, at a cost of £40 or £60 million a time, depending on how you do the sums. It has been on the test bed or the drawing board for longer than the last two great European wars put together, and was origi- nally dreamed up to help Nato fight the next one, against Russia. By the time that it comes into service, that may be the plan again, but the five sponsoring governments (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) are still the only customers. If you felt like plac- ing an order, it would certainly be welcome, and would help to spread the costs. At pre- sent, though, the plan is to help Russia, and we could save ourselves money by giving its only world-class industry a decent export order, scrapping the Eurofighter and stan- dardising on the MiG. There was one on show at Farnborough.
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