Ullo Johan! Gotta New Motor?

The Case For And Against Putting the Typhoon's Engine In the Gripen E

Earlier this week, I talked about the possibility of a Canadian Gripen, and the reasons why it would be a good idea. I slightly skipped over the issue of the US-built engine, noting only that any skullduggery by the US in blocking Canadian shopping outside the US would be an “unmistakable vindication of the choice to look elsewhere.” I didn’t really want to open this can of worms, as it is a big one.

But I don’t want to run from that question, so let’s get in the weeds. This is a long article, over 4,000 words, so if you have a drink in your hand and are sitting comfortably, let’s go…

Creating modern, or even modernish, fighter aircraft engines is really hard and very expensive. So hard, in fact, that there are only really five countries that can do it today: the United States, the United Kingdom (with Europe), France, Russia, and China, with Japan a near-term possibility. In this sense, little has really changed since the Second World War, when the top-tier engines only came from the USA, UK, Germany, the USSR, and Japan. This made life tricky for neutral or non-aligned countries like Sweden. Sweden had to import and license-produce German engines, which meant it walked a diplomatic knife-edge with the Allies, who were not at all happy about it. But Britain had no engines to spare, and the U.S. prioritised getting engines to its Allies at war.

Though Sweden’s long-standing non-alignment (which softened in 2009 and ended in 2024) lent support to domestically developed fighter aircraft (a kind of miracle for such a small country), a domestic jet engine was not a sensible option. Though one was tried (the STAL Dovern), and the Viggen’s American engine was heavily modified, it still made sense to license-produce or buy from abroad. And now, Sweden’s dependence on U.S. engines is on many people’s minds.

Ullo Johan! Gotta New Motor?

For years, the idea has been quietly drifting through European aerospace circles. It appears in engineering workshops, in procurement debates, in the whispered conversations of defence attachés who understand exactly how delicate sovereignty can be when tied to somebody else’s supply chain. And the idea is this: take the Eurofighter Typhoon’s EJ200 engine, a famously powerful and elegantly engineered European turbofan, and put it into the Gripen E, an aircraft admired for its software, fancy electronics, and unfashionably moderate maintainability. What emerges on the other side would be far more than a modified fighter. It would be a genuine Western, fully front-line combat aircraft that stands outside the gravitational pull of