South Africa has scrapped a requirement to fit its planned 24 British Aerospace Hawk 100 lead-in fighter trainers (foreground) with a multimode radar, in the face of prohibitively high integration costs and budget constraints.
The South African Air Force has told competing radar suppliers Elta and FIAR that it is dropping plans to install a lightweight radar in the tandem-seat Hawk. Funding has become an issue as Pretoria struggles to finance the purchase of 28 Saab BAe Gripen fighters in addition to the Hawks.
An executive with one of the two radar firms clearly feels the UK manufacturer is to blame for the decision, saying: "BAe has killed the programme by quoting an enormous amount of money for integration and installation."
The air force is understood to have been keen to fit a radar to its Hawk 100s from the outset. It was evaluating the Elta 2032 and Fiar Grifo radars, neither of which has been fitted to the Hawk. The single-seat Hawk 200 light fighter uses the Northrop Grumman APG-66H.
Installing a radar in the smaller nose of the Hawk 100 would have required extensive structural modification. BAe offers the option of an extended nose to hold a laser range finder or forward looking infrared imager. It had instead proposed equipping the jet with a simulated radar for training.
Source: Flight International
