Aermacchi comes to Paris celebrating both the old and the new. The company's 90th anniversary coincided with last week's rollout of the new Aermacchi M-346 Advanced and Lead-In Fighter Trainer.
Italian government ministers watched the ceremony which, the company will be telling Le Bourget visitors, is a testimony to its continuity in designing and manufacturing its own aircraft and the Aermacchi commitment to maintain the expertise gained in the training aircraft field.
The M-346 programme was launched in January 2000 and is the outcome of studies on new generation advanced trainers started by Aermacchi in the late 1980s. These culminated with the risk reduction programme launched in 1993, which led to development and manufacture of the Y/A-130D technology demonstrator that had about 300 flights from April 1996 to December 1999.
ComplexThe M-346 is a high subsonic aircraft specifically designed to train pilots to perform advanced and complex tasks on current and next generation combat aircraft. Equipped with two Honeywell F124 engines, the aircraft features the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of its category - about double that of current generation advanced trainers.
With its advanced aerodynamic configuration and a quadruplex reconfigurable digital fly-by-wire flight control system, the M-346 shows handling characteristics and the ability to fly at angles of attack similar to those of the latest generation fighters (about 40°) so allowing the simulation of different degrees of piloting difficulty, as well as mimicing different operational aircraft's in-flight behaviour.
The M-346 development schedule is based on three fully instrumented aircraft, the third being representative of the production configuration, and two full-scale structural test articles. The first prototype installation conformity checks will begin soon after Paris, followed by post-installation functional tests and the flight test campaign, planned to start in the last quarter of this year. Military certification, covered by a specific agreement with the Italian air force, is expected for the beginning of 2007.
Source: Flight Daily News
