Phalcon: Costlier by the day

New Delhi, May 26: Israel has hiked the price for the Phalcon airborne warning and control centres by a third after the Indian Air Force opened negotiations to order three more systems.

The first of the systems mounted on a Russian Ilyushin-76 landed in Delhi today after a delay of about 18 months, and is set to be formally inducted into the Indian Air Force on Thursday.

Three Phalcon AWACS were contracted by the IAF in 2004 in a tripartite deal involving Russia, which was to supply the aircraft, Israel, which mounted the systems, and India.

The schedule went awry, first, because the delivery of the aircraft to Israel was delayed and then because of problems in integrating the Israeli systems to the Russian platform. The deal was worth $1.1 billion.

The delivery of the remaining two aircraft of the 2004 deal is likely only in 2004.

Air Force sources said the additional three Phalcons being negotiated should be inducted by 2012. But the price negotiations are taking time and even though the follow-on order means that much of the bureaucratic red tape will be bypassed, the signing of the contract is still some weeks away.

Now, the Israelis have hiked their charges and that would take the cost to more than $1.43 billion (Rs 6,800 crore approximately). If the Russians too demand higher costs for the aircraft, the negotiations could take even longer.

The AWACS are designed to function as a super command and control centre in wartime. The induction of the system into the IAF gives a distinct technological advantage to the force over the Pakistani Air Force.

In its belly the aircraft holds 12 workstations that control radar, electronic intelligence and surveillance systems and communication equipment capable of tracking 60 targets simultaneously about 400km inside enemy territory both on the ground and in the air.