Remember Firefox? That was the Soviet fighter in Craig Thomas’ eponymous 1977 bestseller, made into a Clint Eastwood movie in 1982. Capable of Mach 5 and nearly invisible to radar, Firefox—in Thomas’ book, the NATO code name for a fictional MiG-31—could fly 3,000 miles and cruised comfortably at 80,000 feet and Mach 3-plus. Its weapons were controlled by the pilot’s thoughts, in Russian, and it could be shot down only by another Firefox. It was, and remains, an impossible dream machine.
But it reflected the fighter arms race ethic of its day, which echoed the Olympic motto: Faster, Higher, Stronger. In the 1970s, it was still possible to believe that the side with the fastest, highest, strongest fighter would win the war that seemed to be right around the corner.
In this atmosphere, the United Kingdom began to think about the airplane that would become the Eurofighter Typhoon. Ideally, it would be an agile, supersonic interceptor that could also hit targets on the ground. (Britain needed an interceptor because, like the U.S. Air National Guard, the Royal Air Force scrambles against intruders. In 2010, jets were scrambled twice in a week to intercept Russian Tu-95 “Bear” bombers near British airspace.) At first, the multi-role aircraft was to have the short-takeoff, vertical-landing (STOVL) characteristics of the British Aerospace Harrier, but as the sketch was more fully rendered, the STOVL capability was dropped, given instead to an improved Harrier II. The Typhoon was modified as an air superiority fighter.
As the fighter design evolved, however, the world of aerial combat was changing.
http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/Typhoon-Watch.html
Europe’s Typhoon or Euro-fighter goes through its paces
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