UK screws up on transport plane purchase

Daily Mail:

Defence ministers are condemned today for spending up to £12.3billion on a fleet of aircraft that are unable to fly in Afghanistan.

The Ministry of Defence has bought 14 aircraft designed to transport troops and equipment and carry out air-to-air refuelling. But the Airbus A330-200 planes cannot be flown in warzones because they lack proper protection, a National Audit Office report has revealed.

Fitting them with armour, antimissile systems and early warning kit to allow them to operate in ‘high threat environments’ would cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds more, the spending watchdog said.


The programme for the tankers and transport aircraft is already running five-and-a-half years behind schedule. Opposition MPs said it highlighted the ‘utter incompetence’ of Labour’s defence procurement programme.

The delay means the RAF is forced to rely on ‘ageing and increasingly unreliable’ VC10 and Tristar aircraft, which date back to the Cold War. Extra maintenance work to keep the old planes in the air will cost another £500million before the new planes are delivered before 2016.

...

Astonishingly, the NAO report said that initially it was ‘not envisaged’ that the joint tanker and transport planes would be required to fly directly into conflict zones. This is apparently why no funding was provided for protective equipment.
What were they thinking?

I suspect they were thinking they needed to find ways to build the plane on the cheap and leaving out the equipment needed to defend the plane looked like a bargain. I suspect Gordon Brown was in on this decision. Perhaps he will be asked about it.

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