Turkey Orders Eurofighters For $360 Million Each After Failure to Buy More Advanced F-35s

The United Kingdom and Turkey on October 28 signed a £5.4 billion ($7.2 billion) contract for the sale of 20 Eurofighter fourth generation fighters, with British sources reporting an agreement for a further £2.6 billion ($3.5 billion) for modernisation kits. At $360 million each, this makes the Eurofighters among the most costly combat jets ever exported, exceeding the already highly controversial prior sale of Eurofighters for $321 million each to Kuwait. To place this figure in perspective, the more advanced F-35A fifth generation fighter has consistently been exported for well under $150 million per aircraft, with Finland having purchased 66 of the fighters for$147 million each including extensive technology transfers and local manufacturing, which Turkey’s Eurofighter deal notably lacks. The Eurofighter has long struggled on foreign markets, and other than a small sale of 12 early production variants to Austria in 2003, the Turkish deal represents the first ever export outside the Gulf region.

The Eurofighter has lost every tender in which it has completed against the F-35, and has been able to sustain production primarily due to continued orders from the four partner countries which developed it, namely the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain. These countries have all faced domestic pressure to support local industry, with Germany and Italy hedging between the Eurofighter to preserve the program, and the F-35 to provide a superior combat capability, while the United Kingdom has prioritised the F-35 and ended Eurofighter purchases while beginning to phase its Eurofighters out of service. The fighter’s combat potential has widely been reported to suffer from serious limitations, with reports from Saudi Arabia and Oman which both procured the aircraft indicating that it has compared poorly to even much older American fighter types. This combined with the aircraft’s high maintenance needs has resulted in a limited ability to attract clients.

Turkey has struggled to modernise its ageing fighter, which is comprised of some of the world’s last Vietnam War era F-4 fighters, and older variants of the F-16 reliant on obsolete avionics and mechanically scanned array radars. Turkey was previously set to become a client for the F-35 to replace its F-4s and F-16s, before being barred from procuring the stealth fighters in 2019 due to its procurement of Russian S-400 air defence systems. The country’s fighter fleet has since faced an increasingly uncertain future, with Ankara having entered talks to procure Russian Su-35 fighters in 2019, and signed a preliminary deal in June 2024 to acquire F-16 Block 70/72 fighters from the United States.

An inability to procure Russian or Chinese fighters due to its status as a NATO member, poor relations with France which produces the more successful Rafale fighter, and the United States’ unwillingness to supply either F-35s or F-16s, has left the Turkish Defence ministry with effectively no alternatives to the Eurofighter. This has allowed the program to achieve a breakthrough on export markets despite its limitations, with Turkey’s unique political circumstances ruling out all of the Eurofighter’s major competitors.