A report by state news agency Yonhap quotes the country’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) as saying that Seoul will obtain 40 F-35s starting in 2018, with an option to buy 20 more aircraft.
The deal will be conducted through the US government’s Foreign Military Sales mechanism.
Deliveries will begin in 2018.
Seoul will also obtain an additional 20 fighter aircraft of unspecified type, but the timeframe and details of this acquisition are not clear.
This additional requirement would appear to leave room for Boeing and Eurofighter, which pitched the F-15 Silent Eagle and Eurofighter Typhoon in the original 60 aircraft F-X III competition, to make a significant sale in South Korea.
The original F-X III requirement called for Seoul to obtain 60 new fighters. The only aircraft to come in under the DAPA’s budget of won (W) 8.3 trillion ($7.7 billion) budget was Boeing’s proposed F-15SE, an upgraded version of the venerable type with low observable features and other improvements.
In September, however, Seoul decided to re-tender the competition following the air force’s reiteration that it wants a stealth aircraft to fill the requirement.
flightglobal
No comments:
Post a Comment