BAe to move Hawk production to India full time?

www.flightglobal.com...

Still reeling from its recent rejection by the United Arab Emirates, BAE Systems is assessing its long-term production prospects for the Hawk advanced jet trainer, with a joint venture deal with India's Hindustan Aeronautics among options being considered.

first we had the Folland Gnat- with a very long and successful time in India and now a possibility that Hawk AJT productuion could move there permanantly.

reply to post by Harlequin


Hey Harlequin,
I guess this means some Indian's will be getting richer, right, remember the Saudia Arabia deal, not to mention other places.
Is this a move for the NWO fortune 500 corp looking for more control and another foot into that part of the world, we shall see. Watch for some new bank accounts and new people making the news.
Maybe other Defense corp could take a lesson from BAE in getting their foot in the door, but sorry for UK manufacturing getting ready to suffer, just like in the USA, the glorious plan of the NWO to take over the world, this is just one step closer.
gwhint

I'd guess BAE is considering the move because they have too much work on hand, or are expecting to, they do have decent workshare in a lot of projects.

reply to post by MisterVoid


or maybe because they know the old bird is getting left behind, its airframe design is coming up to 40 years old. It may be a way of ringing a few more quid out of it before it dies.

Shame they don't believe in designing new planes anymore, then we might even have a rival to the M346 or T-50 that actually looks the part.

The Hawk is a trainer and light attack aircraft (well, for some anyway) the airframe design is sound and pretty agile and the avionics have had constant upgrades, it's not the kind of thing we're ever going to throw into high intensity combat so why spend more on it than needed, it's already had a raft of fairly major upgrades to allow it to be used as a trainer on modern all glass planes.

If I had my way the british army would have hawks in the air core for COIN ops (along with a hell of a lot more helicopters)

All true, but in 1970 you could have said the same about the Gnat, yet the Hawk was designed from scratch.

When you look at a truly modern trainer like the M346 the Hawk looks distinctly old fashioned and as superficial as that seems, it does play a part, like it or not. An all new BAE trainer could hardly be justified in view of the small requirement for the Hawk T.2, however given BAe's large and long standing export customer base for the Hawk, which began with the Swiss in 1980, I really think the effort would have been worth it, Aermacchi obviously think so and the Hawk was vastly superior to their MB 339 (which was itself a warmed over MB326, in much the same way as the Hawk 128 is a revamp of the Mk 1 - point proven perhaps?).

Way back in the 1980's a BAe senior executive, quoted in Flight, said he could see the Hawk generating business for BAe for 100 years, I think they are trying to prove him right.