On 21 April 2026 the European Commission signed a grant agreement worth €15,454,477.10 for a four-year action intended to improve the testing capabilities of Europe’s strategic wind tunnels. It is civil money, awarded under the Climate, Energy and Mobility cluster of Horizon Europe, and it sits alongside two older and larger figures: a €47 million European Investment Bank loan to ONERA that reached signed status at the end of 2018 inside a project costed at €306 million, and the €18 million of equipment and operating expenditure plus €22 million of remuneration for 230 staff that the French Senate identified in 2020 as the incompressible annual burden of merely keeping the ONERA wind tunnels in being. None of these amounts measures what a European military aircraft programme can actually test, and none can be added to the others without producing a quantity that corresponds to nothing physical. Each occupies a different position in a chain running from financial authority to usable design evidence, and only its final stages touch an aircraft programme at all. What the figures leave open is the question on which European freedom of action in combat-air development turns: when a required aerodynamic experiment cannot be run in the intended facility, is there another European installation that can produce evidence good enough for the same design decision, and is that installation free to take the work?