First Tiger deployment: Aussie Tiger to Afghanistan

Coming soon: the Eurocopter Tiger’s first deployment. 😀

The Australian Army is planning an accelerated deployment of the Aussie Tiger ARH to support Aussie & Dutch forces in Uruzgan province in Afghanistan. Expect this to happen in spring/summer 2008.

The Tigers will operate alongside 5 Dutch AH-64D Apaches already deployed. Several Australian pilots have had to be trained in France instead of the regular training in Australia in order to ensure enough pilots are available to support this accelerated deployment.

Source (in French):
http://www.ttu.fr/francais/TTUonline.html

Can anyone confirm from an Australian source?

Comments? Predictions? Anyone else excited about seeing pictures of AH-64s and Tigers operating side by side? 😀 😀 😀

As a reminder, current Tigers in service stand at 30:

France: 10 Tigre HAP
Australia: 9 Tiger ARH
Germany: 6 Tiger UHT
Spain: 3 Tigre HAP
+ 2 unknown