UK to buy P-8A

There's been some coverage of the Boeing P-8A being purchased (or not) by the UK. Well, announcement at the Farnborough Airshow today indicates that the UK has brokered a £3 bn deal. The deal brings with it significant other benefits to the UK. The deal is for nine aircraft.

The link is to the BBC which has some contextual narrative about Farnborough.

BBC

A few things to question.

1. If Scotland decides to leave the UK then the choice of siting will have to change from RAF Lossiemouth to save wasting money on upgrading facilities in Scotland.
2. Does BREXIT impact on the intention to make the UK the headquarters for European operations. Assume as this deal is post-BREXIT the consequences have been thought through.
3. Will an aircraft be on station in the South Atlantic?

originally posted by: paraphi

3. Will an aircraft be on station in the South Atlantic?

It didn't happen with the Nimrod MR variants so it is not likely that P-8s will be any different. Nimrods have on occasion temporarily deployed to the Falklands but never a regular occurrence.

It would take a heightened state of threat for such an asset to be stationed down there. The RAF C-130 provides the surface maritime coverage.

www.raf.mod.uk...

a reply to: paraphi

1. If Scotland does go solo, they'll work out a basing agreement to put them there.

Another poor defence decision by our UK government that is so far up the US's arse that it's laughable!

They completely ignored the advice given by senior techs in the RAF and the MoD and simply signed up for this program and dismissed the competitors which would have given us a much more independent platform at a much better price.

While the P8 is a capable platform it's very overpriced and comes with the usual caveats from a bit of US kit :

1. Locked in to US software, we'll see no doubt a repeat of the F35 debacle where we had no access to full source code for the sensor and avionics packages (even after threatening the US will a pull out of the program we didn't get only got partial access) BAE engineers are still fuming about that one, joking the Chinese know more about the aircraft than they do!
2. Absolutely no chance of getting any manufacturing work here in the UK, (thankfully the F35 didn't completely arse that section up)
3. Overpriced and we'll not be getting value for money on this program.

Because our government is so desperate to suck up to the US right now, we end up paying 50% more than we should, and it will end up (Like Trident, F35, AWACS) with us dependent on US companies to provide coding, servicing support, training etc for the lifetime of the program, meaning our flexibility is reduced. We pretty much are an extra state of the US now defence wise.

Neither the very capable P1 from Japan or one of the Airbus options was even considered, the decision to buy the P8 was a political one, not a technical one. Indeed the Japanese offered us 5 aircraft for less than $250million, you can't buy two P8's for that and the capabilities are very close, they offered full technical sharing, even partnership on future upgrade options that could be co-developed with BAE.

A very sad day for the UK defence industry.

The Brits must think their politicians are bum boys, to be bent over and shafted whenever the Americans feel like it, and pay for the 'privilege' too!

originally posted by: pikestaff
The Brits must think their politicians are bum boys, to be bent over and shafted whenever the Americans feel like it, and pay for the 'privilege' too!

Yep pretty much!

I've watched so many bits of American kit sit unused because it either doesn't work or (in the case of aircraft) declared as unserviceable due to lack of parts / tech support from US suppliers - AWACS / Apache / Chinook etc etc while other equipment is scrapped or run into the ground because there's no money left to maintain them due to budgets being blown on projects like F35.

Ask almost any British Squaddie, Airman, Navy and you'll hear the same story