NATO’s Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) programme office hopes to lock down a contract with the newly created AGS International joint venture for the project’s design and development phase by March next year.
The joint venture was issued with the design and development phase request for proposal this month with a response to be submitted in November, but AGS International says it will brief NATO on its preliminary response in late May.
The formation of AGS Internat-ional was announced at ILA by the six core members of the former Transatlantic Industrial Proposed Solution (TIPS) consortium, comprising Northrop Grumman, EADS, Indra, General Dynamics, Thales and Galileo Avionica. The company will be the primary industry contractor for AGS implementation.
The project is to undergo review at the NATO leaders’ summit in Riga, Latvia, in early December, says NATO programme office head Gen Lars Fynbo.
The design and development phase award will be a fixed-price contract. The phase is worth more than €500 million ($640 million), says Fynbo.
The follow-on engineering and manufacturing development phase contract is expected to take four years to implement and will see deliveries of two Airbus A321s modified to carry the developmental TCAR radar system, and two radar-equipped Northrop RQ-4B Global Hawk unmanned air vehicles. AGS International has been given approval to explore the option of supplying a different radar type for the RQ-4Bs, the company says.
The RFP release comes as both programme and AGS International officials acknowledge the project’s slow progress. Much of the past two years has been spent on risk-reduction, says Johann Heitzmann, head of EADS Military Aircraft.
Source: Flight International
