Adding more teeth to the Navy’s surveillance capabilities, India on Wednesday signed a deal worth over $1 billion with American defence and aerospace major Boeing for procuring four additional Poseidon-8I long-range maritime surveillance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft.
The US has emerged as the biggest supplier of military hardware to India and with Wednesday's agreement, the total value of defence deals signed with the US in the last decade comes to around $15 billion.
According to defence sources, the contract is a follow-on order to the eight P-81 planes worth $2.1 billion bought by India in a direct deal with Boeing in 2009.
The contract was inked during the ongoing visit of US Under Secretary for Defence on Acquisition Frank Kendall and is seen as a sign of growing Indo-US defence ties, defence officials said.
India had last year signed a $3 billion contract with the US through Foreign Military Sales route for 22 Apache and 15 Chinook helicopters. India is also working on a deal to get 145 pieces of M777 light-weight howitzers from the US, the sources said.
The acquisition of additional 'P-8I' will be a shot in the arm for the Indian Navy as the country has been building up its naval surveillance capabilities in recent times.
Armed with deadly Harpoon missiles, light-weight torpedoes and rockets among others, the Navy is extensively using the P-8I to keep a strict vigil on the Indian Ocean, which has seen numerous Chinese submarine forays, including the docking of a nuclear submarine in Sri Lanka.
The Navy will also be able to drop and monitor sonobuoys being used in the search for the missing AN32 aircraft of the Indian Air Force, they said.
Incidentally, India is P-8I's first international customer. It was also Boeing's first military sale to India. The P-8I fleet is based at the Naval Air Station at Rajali in Tamil Nadu. The long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft has an operational speed of 450 miles per hour and a range of 4,500 nautical miles.
The planes will provide strategic blue water and littoral undersea warfare capabilities as well as armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to the Navy, the defence sources said.
Based on Boeing's Next-Generation 737 commercial airplane, P-8I is the Indian Navy variant of the P-8A Poseidon that the American defence firm has developed for the US Navy. “The deal has been signed. The delivery dates are being worked out,” a defence ministry source said. India has already deployed its original eight P-8I aircraft to track submarine movements in the Indian Ocean. “India has a vast maritime border and these planes are meant for long-range surveillance,” a Boeing official said. The Navy will likely deploy them in the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal to counter Chinese influence in the seas," the official said.
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Source: IndianEx
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