Acquisition of Two Helicopters for the Armed Forces

The Council of Ministers has approved the award of a contract for the acquisition of two Cougar helicopters, with spare parts and tooling, for an amount of 40 million euros to be paid out over three years (2007-2009).

Nice news, but what country? Unfortunately the link doesn’t work and the customer is not mentioned in the news text.:confused:

According on Reuters report:

The United States is to supplying the Afghan Air Corps with six helicopter gunships by August and more transport helicopters, some of which will be used by the first Afghan commando units due to finish their training later this month.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL244893.htm

According to Afghan sources the six gunship helicopters will arrive from the Czech Republic. So they are most probably surplus CzAF Mi-24 and the delivery of surplus Czech helicopters was already announced some months ago. So most probably nothing new, no Cobras or similar I suppose.

http://www.e-ariana.com/ariana/eariana.nsf/allDocs/BCC220A674DA39978725731600642289?OpenDocument

In German eyes, Italian and Turkish Air Forces are considered quite “careless” in a technical sense. We have very high technical standards here and every German technician just shakes his head about Southern European maintenance standards. Just some two anecdotes:

– Turkish Phantoms from Erhac visited Germany and practiced together with a German Phantom Wing some time ago. The Germans inspected the tires of their aircraft and put them off because they considered them too worn out and dumped them behind the building. Short time later, the Turkish technicians went there, looked at the tires, took them away and put them on their Phantoms. After inspecting the old Turkish tires it was clear that these tires were even worse than the “old” German ones. :rolleyes:

– Italian Tornados were maintained by German technicians during an exercise and they were supported by some Italians. The Germans opened a hatch on the aircraft and oil began to spill out. They complained about it and the Italian technician just told them they shouldn’t have opened this hatch, it is never opened because of the oil problem.

These stories are surely always a little bit exaggerated but they have always a true part too.:D

Ladies and gents, i give you from Banshees deepest locker…a Sudanese A.5C Fantan:cool:

Awesome.:eek:
I didn’t even know the Sudanese operate any of this aircraft. Does anyony have numbers or more details on Fantans in Sudan? Thanks!

Oh oh…if he chose this name really because of this background then someone should a.s.a.p. kick him out from here.
If anyone doesn’t know what this is all about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustasa

Switzerland may well stay for the JSF if they can get deliveries in time. If they can’t then it will be either super hornets or one of the euro canards.
Finland’s F-18s are getting a little long in the tooth, but i suspect they will go for something cheaper than JSF, there isn’t much political will in Europe for expensive weapons systems.

I think these two countries will either go for the Gripen or the Eurofighter but not for the JSF. The Lightning II doesn’t reflect their needs. Both countries are not involved in any out-of-area operations and so they need a fighter for air defence and only secondary strike capability. Perhaps Finland also turns back to Russia and buys MiG-29SMT. 😉 :rolleyes:

These are most probably Russian ones based there. Russia operates a detachment of 13? MiG-29s there to protect Armenian airspace. Armenia itself has no suitable aircraft (Su-25 for air defence? :rolleyes: ) for this task. Further there are surely also political reasons like for the military detachment at Georgia.