Saturday, October 27, 2012

2nd half of October news

October 2012 has been a nice month in the Rafale life.

Firstly, the C137 AESA has been delivered and has started operational experimentation.

Secondly, Rafale started experimenting the Meteor. Only separation trials for now. France had ordered 200 Meteor in December 2010, and will introduce it in operational service in 2018.
All pictures provided by DGA

 Reminder : in 2005, Rafale already demonstrated its capability to take off and land on its carrier while bringing the Meteor.


Thirdly, we learnt that the first Indian airbase (thanks to the New Indian Express) to be equipped with Rafale will be the Alamba AFB, currently using Jaguar and MiG-21.

The last point of this post is less positive though : our current MoD Le Drian, back from UAE indicated that the Rafale would have to wait. No need to compromise the UAE-France relation with this contract. Whole story here : Le Parisien.
Note that UAE isn't in a hurry to replace the already very good Mirage 2000-9.

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