CONTRACT NEWS IN BRIEF

EUROPE

SEA

03 Jun 08. Babcock Marine awarded maritime CESM contract. Babcock Marine has been awarded a follow-on multi-million pound Communication Electronic Support Measure (CESM) contract to provide in-service support for the sophisticated communication systems on board some of the Royal Navy’s operational surface ships. The four-year enabling contract, awarded by the MoD’s Joint Electronic Surveillance Integrated Project Team (JESIPT) in April, will support communication equipment on a number of surface ship platforms and shore establishments including the Navy’s Shore Training Facility at HMS Collingwood.

28 May 08. QinetiQ has been awarded a £3.8m contract from Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace following their success in winning the Prime Contract from the Norwegian Defence Procurement Division, valued at almost £18m. The Prime Contract is to deliver an integrated Combat System Infrastructure, a new passive sonar system and an upgraded tactical simulator for Norway’s six ULA Class submarines. QinetiQ will provide its proven DeRSCI open architecture software infrastructure and sonar processing applications together with new data acquisition hardware that will bring together the processing system with the existing submarine sonar arrays. The overall system will be built using COTS based hardware integrated with QinetiQ’s advanced sonar processing expertise and combined with Kongsberg’s sonar processing and combat management system capabilities.

AIR

27 May 08. Astrium, has been commissioned by the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop and build the EarthCARE Earth observation satellite. The contract worth € 263m was signed today in Berlin on the occasion of the International Aerospace Exhibition (ILA) by Volker Liebig, ESA’s Director of Earth Observation, Evert Dudok, CEO of Astrium Satellites and Uwe Minne, Director of Earth Observation and Science at Astrium (Friedrichshafen, Germany), in the presence of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain and Head of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) Johann-Dietrich Wörner.

19 May 08. VC10 Aircraft: Availability Contract. BAE Systems announced (19 May 08) that it had received a £43.9m, five-year MoD contract “to ensure the RAF’s VC10 tanking and transport fleet is available on the front line to meet Operational requirements”.
Comment: The remaining VC10 fleet consists of 16 aircraft: 10 C1K dual role tanker/transport variants and six K3/K4 refuelling models. Due to delays in the Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft (FSTA) programme, the VC10 out of service date has been extended to 31 Mar 13 (and may have to be further extended to 2014 or 2015). (Source: DNA DEFENCE NEWS ANALYSIS Issue 08/22, 2 Jun 08)

28 May 08. The German Federal Office for Defence Technology and Procurement (BWB) and Eurocopter Deutschland GmbH signed a contract for the retrofit of six more CH53G transport helicopters operated by the German Army to convert them to mission helicopters fitted with ballistic self protection and specific mission equipment. The order is worth approximately €24m, a large proportion of which will go to medium-sized German equipment manufacturers. The German Army will take delivery of the urgently needed transport helicopters between May and November 2009. (Source: DEFENCENet Daily)

May 08. Boeing announced that Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) has completed the first in-country modification of a 737-700 into an Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) platform for Turkey’s Peace Eagle program.The transformation of Peace Eagle No. 2 follows two years of extensive modifications at the TAI facility in Ankara, Turkey, including the installation of a reinforced section on the upper fuselage that supports the Multi-role Electronically Scanned Array (MESA) antenna. Workers also installed several other antennas, consoles, cabinets, wire bundles, ventral fins, power distributions systems, heat exchange panels and c