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The Defense Ministry said Tuesday it will review plans to acquire airborne early warning systems after a key bidder dropped out of the race. Israel's IAI ELTA has dropped out of the public tender for the so-called ¡°E-X project¡± because it is unable to meet the performance standards demanded by the military.
With the Israeli company pushing its G-550 AEW&C out of the race and Boeing of the United States with its B-737 AEW&C aircraft as the sole remaining bidder, the E-X project, which had initially been scheduled for completion by 2012, will likely be either suspended or start over from scratch. Even if the project is restarted, it will face a delay of more than a year.
Maj. Gen. Won Jang-hwan, the Defense Ministry's chief procurement office, said a meeting next week would decide the future of the project. He said the Air Force had conducted three-month tests on the two companies' aircrafts since last September. During the tests, it discovered that the IAI ELTA aircraft fell short of requirements. The IAI ELTA AEW&C¡¯s radar detection range is the requisite 200 nautical miles (about 370 km), but only if the aircraft's radar makes repeated searches of the area.
Gen. Won said he thought the E-X project was indispensable for the future of the Korean military. If it were restarted, four or five firms capable of building early warning aircrafts would participate, he added.
The E-X project aimed to buy four airborne early warning aircrafts by 2012 with a budget of W2 trillion (about US$2 billion).
(Jang Il-hyeon, ihjang@chosun.com )
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