India’s $11bn MMRCA choice to be clear mid-December
19 Nov 2011
Bangalore: India's choice for a medium range multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) should be out in the open by mid-December, Indian Air Force chief, air chief marshal Norman Anil Kumar Browne, said Friday.
"By mid-December we should have very good sense of who has been selected," ACM Browne told reporters here.
The two rival aircrafts in contention for the contract are the Eurofighter Typhoon and the French Dassault Rafale. The commercial bids of both companies were opened 4 Nov in New Delhi.
"In another four weeks, we should be able to wrap-up the deal as a lot of work is going on and we are calculating hard," ACM Browne said on the margins of a conference on aviation medicine.
Of the original six bidders, the defence ministry short-listed in April European consortium EADS Cassidian (Typhoon) and French Dassault Aviation (Rafale) for the estimated $11 billion (Rs50,000 crore) contract to supply 126 fighters to the Indian Air Force ( IAF).
The four other contending aircraft knocked out of the competition were Lockheed Martin's F-16, Boeing's F/A-18, the Russian United Aircraft Corporation MiG-35 the Swedish SAAB Gripen.