Friday, Apr 19, 2024 | Last Update : 06:30 AM IST
With eye on China, India buys 4 spy planes
In another sign of the growing defence cooperation between India and the US, a deal to buy four more “Poseidon-8I” long-range maritime surveillance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft was signed on We
In another sign of the growing defence cooperation between India and the US, a deal to buy four more “Poseidon-8I” long-range maritime surveillance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft was signed on Wednesday during the ongoing visit of US under secretary for defence on acquisition Frank Kendall.
The latest deal will cost $1 billion and is a follow-on order to the eight P-81 planes already bought by India in a direct deal with the manufacturer Boeing that cost $2.1 billion, defence ministry sources said. This will take the number of such state-of-the-art spy planes to a dozen.
The new additions — with an operational speed of 450 miles per hour and a range of 4,500 nautical miles — will be mean a strong buttressing of the Indian Navy’s surveillance capabilities as well as armed intelligence and under-sea warfare capabilities at a time of numerous Chinese submarine forays, including docking of a nuclear submarine in Sri Lanka, in the Indian Ocean region.
The P-81 comes equipped with Harpoon missiles, lightweight torpedoes, rockets, etc and can also be used to drop and monitor sonobuoys, being used in the search for the missing AN32 aircraft of the Indian Air Force.
The P-8I — which operates from its base in Tamil Nadu’s Naval Air Station at Rajali — is the Indian Navy variant of the P-8A Poseidon that the American defence has developed for the US Navy.
With this deal, the total value of defence deals signed with the US in the last one decade comes to around $15 billion.
Last year, India had inked a $3 billion contract with the US through the government-to-government route for 22 Apache and 15 Chinook helicopters.
A deal to buy 145 of M777 light-weight howitzers from the US is also in the works.
A month back, the Defence Acquisition Council had given the go-ahead to a government-to-government for the howitzers.
With a strike range of 27-kilometre, they are expected to be deployed with the new Mountain Strike Corps that is being raised in the India’s Northeast that has a long international border with China.
