Turbo-Union RB199

The Turbo-Union RB199 is a turbofan jet engine designed and built in the early 1970s by Turbo-Union, a joint venture between Rolls-Royce, MTU and Aeritalia.

The only production application was the Panavia Tornado, but it was used in the British Aerospace EAP whose 1st flight was on 8 August 1986 from Warton, without use of a spare engine on its total 259 flights, and is now in RAF Cosford Museum. It was also used in the first two Prototypes of the Eurofighter Typhoon, whose 1st flight, by DA1, was from Manching, Bavaria on 27 March 1994, and for a further two years before the EJ200 engines were installed - good reliability meant the spare RB199 engine supplied was never used.

Design and development

The RB199 originated with a requirement, in 1969, to power a new European multirole combat aircraft (MRCA) called the Panavia MRCA. The engine requirements to meet the Panavia MRCA specification were significant advances over current engines in thrust-to-weight ratio, fuel consumption and size. The final selection of the engine for the MRCA was made between a new European collaboration, Turbo Union, with the RB199, and Pratt & Whitney who proposed the JTF16. The Panavia MRCA would later be called the Panavia Tornado.

Advanced engine studies at Bristol Siddeley had already been done to support the BAC/Dassault AFVG and were based on the Pegasus two-spool arrangement. At Rolls-Royce, where the three-shaft RB211 engine was in development, three shafts were considered better. Rolls-Royce took over Bristol Siddeley in 1966 so the configuration for the RB199 was decided, a three-shaft engine, but fundamentally to Bristol's design and Bristol's higher technology.

The overall design concept for the international collaborative program, three shafts was decided by Rolls-Royce.