Gripen fighter will be ready for combat in the FAB in 2024 – 12/04/2023 – Politics

The Saab Gripen, a new FAB (Brazilian Air Force) fighter, will be ready for use in combat and interception missions next year, when it will participate in its first military exercise.

The information was provided by the commander of the GDA (Air Defense Group), based in Anápolis (GO), which will concentrate the fleet of 36 fighter jets ordered by Brazil in 2014 and which began to be delivered operationally in December last year.

So far, there are four planes flying, in addition to the first example sent to Brazil by the manufacturer in Sweden to finalize the military certification campaign. Of the 36, 15 should be produced on the joint line of Saab and Embraer in Gavião Peixoto (SP), starting on the 24th.

“We should be at Cruzex in Natal. In fact, this is the armed operation”, stated the commander, Lieutenant Colonel Gustavo de Oliveira Pascotto. Cruzex is a multinational exercise that takes place since 2002, each year in a South American country, involving guests such as the United States.

In 2024, it will be held in the capital of Rio Grande do Norte. By then, there may already be four more Gripen in action in Anápolis.

For now, they are being used to adapt the pilots, whose initial group was trained in Sweden because there is no Gripen with two seats, one of them for the instructor, in Brazil. They don’t do real patrols yet.

In the current generation of the fighter, the third, this plane is called the F model – the E, which is already in Brazil, is for a single pilot. Initially, the schedule foresaw that the eight two-seat fighters in the order would be produced at the Embraer factory.

The model was practically entirely designed in Gavião Peixoto, by a team of 67 engineers, half of them Brazilian. In 2020, the first specific part for its fuselage was cut at Saab’s components factory in São Bernardo do Campo (SP).

But delays due to budgetary hiccups, something chronic in Brazilian strategic programs, ended up forcing Saab to predict the construction of only 4 of the 8 model F aircraft in Brazil, and Embraer considered that the scale did not compensate for the installation of the line.

Saab says that the first F model should be delivered to Brazil in 2015. Last year, the program had a good execution in the budget, however: of the R$ 1.6 billion committed, R$ 1.4 billion was spent, according to the Senate’s federal spending tracking system.

Thus, now only 15 E models will be made in the country. Executives at Saab consider that the main gain in technology transfer to Brazilians was already given when they participated in the design of the plane, which required readapting the entire device from half forward.

The production line, in the end, is just like any other. The formal inauguration will not take place on the 24th because the presence of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) is expected, and Planalto postponed the trip for scheduling reasons.

Commander Gustavo, as he is called in the FAB, also said that the first test in Brazil of a missile capable of killing beyond the horizon is already being planned, in this case the European Meteor, from the MBDA consortium.

The model, the most advanced of its kind, allows the pilot to shoot 100 km or 200 km from the target, being able to update his route along the way. With a ramjet engine, which injects fuel into the supersonic airflow, it reaches almost 5,000 km/h.

It is a rare event even in Europe and the USA, given that each missile, there with a full war load, costs the equivalent of almost R$ 12 million. The Gripen will also operate German-Italian Iris-T short-range missiles, and with that will have the most sophisticated weapons set in Latin America.

They are part of the total purchase package, which came out in 2014 for an amount financed for 25 years that today would be equivalent to around R$ 28 billion. Prices and quantities are not revealed, although analysis of international weapons sales databases indicates that at least 100 Meteors were purchased.

Saab’s intention, which on Tuesday (11) announced at LAAD, the military fair in Rio, a deepening of its partnership with Embraer, is that Brazil be the export base for countries outside the European axis that choose the Gripen.

In Latin America, Colombia and Peru have the Swedish fighter in competition to replace their aging fleets. Within the scope of NATO, the Western military alliance that Sweden may soon have, the Gripen has lost important competitions to the American F-35 in Finland and Canada.

As a less expensive and highly sophisticated aircraft, while lacking the stealth characteristics that place the F-35 in the arbitrary fifth-generation category, Saab hopes it will make an appetizing alternative. It is in disputes in India and Austria, and hopes to renew its presence in Thailand, which already operates older Gripen.