Eurofighter won't take part in the BSDA exhibition, after the decision to acquire F-16

The Eurofighter consortium, the producer of Typhoon fighting craft decided not to take part in the Black Sea Defence&Aerospace exhibition to take place in Bucharest between 13-15 April after the CSAT recommendation regarding the acquisition of 24 fighting F-16 craft second hand.

"Eurofighter expressed their disappointment that no international competitive bid took place which would have allowed the adequate evaluation of all candidate craft. Eurofighter keeps its hope that the Romanian parliament will organise such a competitive process for public procurement" the European consortium says in a press release.

The European consortium considers that by taking this decision, Romania will have to start on a medium and short term "a new programme for the modernization of the fleet for Romanian air forces - a situation which would have been avoided by choosing Eurofighter".

Eurofighter considered that, if Romania had chosen Typhoon, they would have benefited from a fair offset package which would have created many working places in domains of high technology.

According to the quoted source, in the four partner countries in the Eurofighter programme there were created 100,000 working places directly or indirectly in over 400 companies. The positive economic impact of the Eurofighter programme for the four countries was estimated at over 60 billion euros.

Up to now, Eurofighter Typhoon was ordered by six countries (Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, Austria and the Saudi Arabic Kingdom). With 707 ordered craft, this is the biggest military collaboration programme in Europe.

The exhibition and the international conference dedicated to the aeronautical, defence, homeland security and private security industry "Black Sea Defense & Aerospace 2010" is one of the five exhitions in Europe where the Defense Department of the United States of America "US DoD takes place directly in 2010" the site of the exhibition says.