Matra Bae Dynamics (MBD) has handed around £19 million ($27.3 million) in damages to the UK Ministry of Defence because of problems with the £823 million ASRAAM short range air-to-air missile.
Trouble with ASRAAM came to a head last month when defence procurement minister Baroness Symons told MBD to resolve its problems (Flight International, 17-23 April).
BAE Systems, 50% owner of MBD, responded that the missile meets its contractoral requirements, but there are "a small number of non-contract issues which are being discussed, and technical solutions are being prepared".
Details of the payment emerged during a Parliamentary Defence Committee hearing earlier this month, when chief of defence procurement, Sir Robert Walmsley, stated that the damages were £19 million "within a million or so".
While damages are often used to maintain equipment in-service that would have been retired with the introduction of a new system, most of the ASRAAM money will be a direct saving. The Royal Air Force plans to keep the missile's predecessor - the RaytheonAIM-9Sidewinder - in-service on the Panavia Tornado GR4 until around 2018.
Walmsley says lessons from ASRAAM will be applied to the MBD Meteor beyond visual range air-to-air missile. He adds that the formation of MBDA, by combining MBD with Alenia's missile activities, will give the company a "far greater industrial competence in missiles" than BAe Dynamics, which received the ASRAAM contract in 1992.
Walmsley says "one of the reasons we encouraged the formation of MBDA was to give it a total missile competence from the seeker right through to the motor".
Source: Flight International