As Textron AirLand president Bill Anderson has said, the majority of work devoted to designing and developing fighters over the last several decades has focused on creating expensive, sophisticated machines. Whether it's Lockheed’s F-35 and F-22 Raptor, the Eurofighter Typhoon or the Boeing F/A-18, the designs have reflected the desire for advanced performance over affordability. Yet in today's economic environment, cost is becoming an unavoidably compelling issue for even the richest western nations.

Budget busters



Textron aren’t the only ones creating the tech to address this issue. The single jet fighter JF-17 is a Chinese design, currently being built in collaboration with its sole export customer, Pakistan, and is said to be available for around the same per-plane price of US$20m. Meanwhile, a Russian design, the Yak-130, has also been touted as a low-cost plane to carry out everything from air combat to reconnaissance, as well as train pilots.

This isn't the first time plane-makers have offered cheaper designs. The list of current and former operators of the Russian MiG-21 – a 1950s design still going strong today - reads like a who's who of the former Soviet bloc. And other nations who have more recently bought China’s modern upgrades of this old Soviet model show that cheap fighter planes are still a prized purchase for cash-strapped air forces.

The US used to create such designs as well; in the 1960s and 70s, air forces that couldn’t afford the heavy, twin-engined F-4 Phantom were offered the light, adaptable F-5 Freedom Fighter. The F-5 ended up serving in more than 30 air forces, and a reverse-engineered version built in Iran has just entered service with the Iranian Air Force.

There are three main classes of potential customers for planes like the Scorpion, which has a top speed of around 520mph. The first are air forces who want a small jet aircraft capable of carrying out a range of strike and intelligence-gathering missions, and who have either never flown combat jets before or are looking to replace older aircraft. The second are countries who already have, or are developing, high-end fighter forces, but who might buy fewer of the more expensive jets to obtain a larger number of cheaper aircraft. The third are the major military powers who will need the advanced jets for simpler missions in low-risk environments.