Indian Military

[Stratpost]

A C-17 ready for delivery to the United States Air Force (USAF) at Long Beach earlier this year.

The confusion over the price for the sale of ten C-17 aircraft to the Indian Air Force (IAF), about which US President Barack Obama made a preliminary announcement, has been clarified.

News reports on Wednesday indicated a difference in the price of USD 4.1 billion quoted by the White House on one hand and the manufacturer Boeing, which cited a figure of USD 5.8 billion, also one which had been conveyed by the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) in its notification to the US Congress, last April.

A US Government source, who declined to be named for purpose of this report, clarified to StratPost on Wednesday, that the amount of USD 5.8 billion could ‘include as many potential case options as might realistically be considered’, like support equipment and unique engineering requirements.

[Stratpost]

The Indian Air Force (IAF) contest for mid-air refueling tanker aircraft will depend on how a United States Air Force (USAF) competition for a massive order for 179 tankers plays out towards the end of the year.

The Indian tender is being reprocessed after India’s Finance Ministry thought the IAF’s earlier choice of the Airbus A330 MRTT (Multi Role Tanker Transport) over the Russian IL-78 too expensive, earlier this year, and compelled the IAF to start over, to select six tankers that could cost over a billion US dollars.

The IAF is keen on making sure the Russian IL-78 faces sufficient competition and that the relative abilities of the respective aircraft are rendered patently evident. This, coupled with the calculation of life-cycle costs of the aircraft, under the Air Staff Qualitative Requirements (ASQRs), is likely intended to preempt the objections of the Finance Ministry.

In addition to the earlier two contestants, the IAF would also like to get US defense and aerospace major Boeing into the running to make the contest more interesting, if nothing else.

[Stratpost]

Airbus will be submitting a bid in the tender for the purchase of six mid-air-refueling aircraft by the Indian Air Force (IAF), according to company sources. The deadline for the submission was pushed back by a month after being originally marked for mid-December.

While, earlier, two of the three potential vendors, Boeing and Airbus, had been waiting to see who won the US $ 35 billion KC-X program contract to supply 179 mid-air-refueling tankers to the United States Air Force (USAF), in a postponed-decision that was due last month, the latter has made up its mind about the Indian tender and intends to submit its bid, by the January 12, 2011 deadline.

As reported by StratPost earlier, the response to the Indian RFI was contingent on the result of the US tender as neither company wanted to commit to work an assembly line for only six aircraft in the absence of the much larger US order.

In the meantime, there has been much drama over the KC-X program, with the USAF having inadvertently sent their evaluation of the aircraft pitched by each company to the rival vendor.

[Stratpost]

European aerospace major, Airbus will show off a model of its A330 MRTT at Aero India 2011 in Bangalore next month.

Airbus has pitched the aircraft for the Indian Air Force (IAF) competition for six mid-air refueling aircraft, in which it is likely to be competing with the Russian IL-78. This is the second time the IAF running this tender, after its selection of the MRTT was rejected last year because the Indian Finance Ministry considered the aircraft too expensive, especially considering that the IAF already flies the Russian aircraft.

Airbus is also hoping to win the United States Air Force (USAF) KC-X tender program for 179 refueling aircraft, in which it is competing with Boeing.

Airbus Military will also exhibit a model of its C295 twin-turboprop military transport aircraft, which it says is ‘able to carry up to nine tonnes of cargo, land on unprepared airstrips, and perform the widest range of missions ranging for anti-submarine warfare to maritime and border surveillance and any kind of humanitarian aid’.

[Stratpost]

Anytime now, the Indian Air Force (IAF) should be submitting its report on the technical evaluations of six aircraft for its 126 Medium Multi Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) tender, indicating its assessment and by extension, preferences, after which the Ministry of Defense (MoD) will open the commercial bids submitted by the six vendors and list them in terms of the best prices offered.

But in this contest, the IAF has to make a comparison of the performances of single-engine aircraft, the Gripen and the F-16, with twin-engine fighters, the MiG-35, F/A-18 Super Hornet, Rafale and Eurofighter Typhoon. Speculative noises over the past year have indicated it to be entirely possible for all these aircraft to make the cut as far as the parameters or Air Staff Qualitative Requirements (ASQRs) laid down by the IAF are concerned.

Indeed, the varied character of the six aircraft taking part in the competition, which also cleared the paper-evaluation of their respective technical abilities last year, indicates that possibly all six aircraft could match these parameters in different ways to, more or less, the same extent.