Europe’s Typhoon Fighter For the first time since World War II,
fighters are stationed at RAF Northolt. - By Carl Posey - Air &
Space magazine, July 2012 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 E