Air Tractor turns crop duster into affordable COIN aircraft

Air Tractor has developed a light attack variant of its AT-802 agricultural and fire-fighting aircraft which it intends to promote as a low-cost counterinsurgency (COIN) and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platform for the international market.

Speaking at the Paris Air Show in June, Lee Jackson, a design engineer at Air Tractor, told Jane's that the company is pitching the AT-802U to Afghanistan and a number of Middle Eastern and European air forces. According to Jackson, to date, the company has received firm interest in the two-seat turboprop aircraft "from well over 20 countries".

The AT-802U is essentially an armed version of the armoured crop spraying aircraft which has been used in South America since 2002 as a counter-narcotics platform. It was on the back of this mission that, in 2007, the US Department of Defense (DoD) approached Air Tractor with an aim to develop an armed variant of the aircraft.

Having been in service in its various guises for well over 30 years, Jackson said that there is very little flight-testing to be done on the AT-802U and that it is now only a question of integrating the weapon and sensor systems before the aircraft can be offered for sale.

The company is still working on a cost analysis for the aircraft but Jackson said that it will be "significantly lower" than its two main competitors in the light attack role; the Embraer Super Tucano and the Hawker Beechcraft AT-6B Texan II.