Saab nears Gripen contract with Brazil

    

Saab Gripen

      Saab is on track to sign a contract with Brazil to provide its air force with
 the Gripen NG multirole fighter, following the nation's selection of the type for
 a 36-aircraft purchase in December 2013.

Speaking on 23 October, chief executive Håkan Buskhe said an agreement 
should be signed “in the near future”.

“The negotiations with Brazil regarding Gripen NG (Gripen E/F) move forward
 according to plan, and the ambition is to reach an agreement in the near future,”
 Buskhe states, as part of the Swedish company's year-to-date financial results 
release.

On 18 December 2013, Brazilian defence minister Celso Amorim and air force 
commander Gen Juniti Saito declared Saab the winner of the F-X2 fighter contest. 
It was also announced that the negotiation phase would take 10-12 months to complete.

The acquisition will cost some $4.5 billion, with the purchased aircraft to 
replace retired Dassault Mirage 2000C fighters and a number of modernised
 Northrop F-5EMs. Deliveries are expected to start 48 months after the contract 
is signed, and will eventually reach a rate of 12 aircraft per year.

An option to supply Brazil a bridging fleet of existing Swedish air force
 Gripen C/Ds could also be included in the deal, following Brasília’s retirement of
 its Mirage 2000C/Ds at the end of 2013 and the need for an interim capability
 until the new-build Gripens enter service.

In July, a memorandum of understanding was signed by Saab and 
Brazilian manufacturer Embraer, whose absence had been noted last December 
when the Gripen selection was announced. “This is thought to further strengthen
 Gripen’s position in the market,” Buskhe says.

Brazil’s Gripens will be assembled at Embraer’s military factory and flight test 
centre in Gavião Peixoto, the company's chief executive Frederico Curado said
 in July.

Embraer will also play a role in developing the two-seat version of the Gripen 
NG, which would mark its first significant effort in designing and producing
 a new supersonic aircraft. 

                                                                                                                    Flightglobal

Mystery Deepens Over Reported Russian Sub in Sweden

STOCKHOLM — Mystery deepened Sunday over a Swedish military operation triggered by “foreign underwater activity” off the coast of Stockholm, amid an unconfirmed report of a hunt for a damaged Russian submarine.

Late Saturday, Swedish armed forces stepped up an operation — involving more than 200 men, stealth ships, minesweepers and helicopters — in an area about 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of the Swedish capital. The manuevers were initiated Friday after the armed forces said they had been informed of a “man made object” in the water.

Officials denied they were “submarine hunting,” calling the mobilization — one of the biggest, barring purely training exercises, since the Cold War — an “intelligence operation.”

Russia also denied on Sunday that any of its submarines were involved.


“There have been no irregular situations and, even less so, accidents involving Russian naval vessels,” the Russian defence ministry said in a statement.

But the respected Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet reported that a damaged Russian submarine was at the center of the mystery.

Russian Emergency Transmission
The report said that Swedish military intelligence had intercepted radio signals between an area off the coast of Stockholm and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad — home to much of Russia’s Baltic Sea naval fleet.

“It was transmitted on a special frequency, used by Russia in emergency situations,” the newspaper wrote, citing Swedish military sources involved in the search.

Sweden’s armed forces remained tight-lipped, but did say its focus was on “underwater activities.”

“The Swedish Armed Forces are not in a position to deny or verify media news or speculations recently published about a missing foreign submarine,” spokesman Erik Lagersten said.

“At the moment we are conducting an intelligence operation in the archipelago of Stockholm with optical reconnaissance as well as with naval vessels equipped with qualified underwater sensors... to establish if there are or has been foreign underwater activities in the area.”

Anonymous military sources told Svenska Dagbladet that the emergency signal in Russian was intercepted on Thursday evening, and that further encrypted signals were sent on Friday after Swedish armed forces began combing the area.

In August 2000 the Kursk, a Russian nuclear submarine, sank in the Barents Sea killing the entire crew of 118. Russian authorities were later criticized for refusing international assistance and for misleading the public about the pace of their failed rescue operation.

In recent months, Sweden has seen an uptick in Baltic Sea maneuvers by the Russian air force. In one incident in September, two SU-24 fighter-bombers allegedly entered Swedish airspace in what Foreign Minister Carl Bildt at the time called “the most serious aerial incursion by the Russians” in almost a decade.

During the 1980s and early ’90s, the then-neutral — and now non-aligned — Nordic country was regularly on alert following Russian submarine sightings, including one notable case in 1981 when a Soviet U-boat ran aground several miles from one of Sweden’s largest naval base.