Tornado GR4 availability question....
 

hurrrrmphing taxpayer question.

the UK bought some 228 Tornado GR1's in the early 1980's, but only 148 were upgraded to GR4 standard starting in about 1997.

can anyone explain how the Tornado GR fleet has gone from above 200 airframes to a situation where whenever anyone asks why GR4's can't shoulder some of the Harriers CAS load in A'stan, they are met with seemingly shifty answers of 'they're busy over Iraq' - problem being, there's only a handful over Iraq...

what happened to the rest?

cheers.

Suggest you go to the RAF website and look for FoI links and pose your question there.

Or even better write to your MP. Me thinks you wont find a (serious) answer in these parts........DOH

If you try http://www.tornado-data.com/

You'll be surprised what's available open source!

Same goes with the Harriers.
Over 60 airframes "were" in RAF service, a few are out in Afghanistan but why are Cottesmore hardly flying these days? It's either non flying during the day because they are 'night flying' or they are not flying much at all.

Last year i remember, they were up day and night. Whats changed? Apart from Squadron changes?

> You'll be surprised what's available open source!

My god! Tornados use three 28V DC buses!

(rushes off to dispatch suspicious airmail...)

Phil

Quite a few got shot down by the Iraqis, at least one by the Americans and many more have been lost to training accidents.

When I was at Marham (2002 ish) we scraped a load of GR1s. Many (if not all) were the batch 1 aircraft that had been used at TTTE. Of course the attrition rate has also taken its toll.

Red Ken is about to scrap those too!

The spreadsheet on that link does tell you where loads of them went to though.

If you can be bothered looking!:hmm:

We must have lost a lot of aircrew since the GR1 was procured; even if we had 150 active airframes, would we have enough aircrew to man the squadrons that would fly them?

I presume if we decided we wanted more airframes, it would not be possible to build them anyway.

Phil

Not just aircrew, you'd need a massive boost to ground support for them too - and the associated trades. Since no support or enlargement seems to be forthcoming, it looks like we wouldnt be able to sustain the full 150 airframes, even if we had em...

I heard very recently that RAF has enough aircrew to man no more than 90 and not all at once. 1000 bomber raid anyone?