Tri-National Tornado Training Establishment
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The Tri-National Tornado Training Establishment (TTTE) was a unit based at RAF Cottesmore in Leicestershire, England. It performed training on the Panavia Tornado for the Royal Air Force, Luftwaffe and Italian Air Force. The memorandum of understanding establishing the unit was signed in 1979 by the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy and the unit came into existence on 29 January 1981. The first RAF Tornados arrived at the base on July 1st 1980; Luftwaffe Tornados arrived on September 2nd 1980; and Italian Tornados arrived much later on April 5th 1982. Allocation of aircraft was Germany: 23, UK: 19, and Italy: 6. Flying training began on January 5th 1981. It was manned by personnel of all three participating nations, trained 300 crews a year when at its height and consisted of three squadrons of Tornados. All servicing was done by RAF groundcrew.
In the post-Cold War era, the three nations decided that they would be better served performing their own type training. There was also a need to find space for British aircraft returning to the UK from bases in Germany, such as RAF Bruggen, that were closing. Consequently the unit disbanded on February 24th 1999, with Tornado flying ending on March 31st 1999.
While the Eurofighter project has followed the example of the Tornado programme in many ways, the TTTE model was not adopted. Rather the Eurofighter partners (Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom) have chosen to run national training schemes.
