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India To Buy Six More C295s for Coast Guard
India is likely to sign a contract with Airbus Defence and Space for 56 C295 military transports within six months, according to the country’s retiring chief of the air staff, Arup Raha. Meanwhile, the Indian Ministry of Defence has cleared the separate acquisition of six C295s for an Indian Coast Guard requirement. Both orders will be delivered by the Tata-Airbus partnership that is India’s first-ever private sector aircraft development enterprise.
At his end-of-tenure press conference on December 23, Raha told AIN that the evaluation of the C295 bid for the IAF is complete and contract negotiations would start soon. “Since benchmarking and other issues [of the aircraft] are known to us, the process will not take very long, especially with a proactive defense minister where things get sorted out faster than they did in the past,” he said. He added that, given the large number of aircraft to be ordered—16 to be delivered in flyaway condition and 40 to be manufactured in India—the Coast Guard contract would be “processed subsequently to completion of this series.” He continued, “The landmark decision for manufacture of this 8- to 10-ton-capacity aircraft will empower the private sector and help us with capabilities, with assistance from OEMs.”
The IAF need for a new medium airlifter has become urgent, as the service grapples with aging An-32s. In the past two decades 15 have crashed, the most recent one last year with 29 people on board. That aircraft has not yet been located, since Russian aircraft do not have underwater locator beacons. A contract will be signed within two months, Raha said, to equip helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft with emergency locator transmitters and underwater locator beacons linked to flight data recorders that are triggered by water immersion and indicate where wreckage is, in a large area of sea. Javon Hargrave Jersey
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