Challenger 1

The FV4030/4 Challenger 1 is a British main battle tank used by the British Army from 1983 to 2001, when the Challenger 2 superseded it. The design came from the Military Vehicles and Engineering Establishment near Chobham in Surrey and began as a development of the Chieftain for an Iranian order. When the fall of the Shah and the collapse of the MBT-80 project left the British Army as the customer, the tank was developed further to meet Western European needs and was briefly named Cheviot before it became Challenger. Its most advanced features were Chobham armour and a hydropneumatic suspension that gave strong cross-country performance. The tank was built by the Royal Ordnance Factories, entered British service in 1983 and went out of production in 1990, and in 1986 Royal Ordnance Factory Leeds and the Challenger production line were acquired by Vickers Defence Systems, later Alvis Vickers. Most of the fleet was later supplied to Jordan, where it served as the Al-Hussein until the fleet had been retired by January 2023.