18 June 2019

Paris Air Show 2019: New air-combat training consortium looks for opportunities in GCC

by Alan Warnes

Red Sky, a new consortium led by French businessmen based in the United Arab Emirates, is set to field a new global adversary training service aimed at the militaries of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, one of the companies involved has told Jane’s .

CSIR’s Inundo EW pod (centreline station) and E-Systems Solutions’s DRFM jammer pod (right) will play significant parts in Red Sky’s adversary training service. (CSIR)

After recently acquiring a fleet of nine ex-Mirage 2000C/D Radar Doppler Impulse (RDI) jets from the Brazilian Air Force, Red Sky is in the process of buying 12 BAE Systems Hawks from an unnamed country and a similar number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for its new manned/unmanned air-combat training business.

The consortium comprises UAE-based Main Arrow, E-Systems Solutions, South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and France’s Diginext.

CSIR will provide scientific electronic warfare (EW) knowledge along with its test facilities. E-Systems Solutions and CSIR worked together last year on developing the Inundu EW pod and fifth-generation net-centric digital radio frequency memory (DRFM) jammer.

Diginext will provide the live, virtual, and constructive (LVC) distributed training mission, which will involve tactical data-linked platforms and computer-generated forces. The company is already working with the French military.

E-System Solutions is responsible for the payload and mission integration of air-launched transonic UAVs and the DRFM jammer. “We are introducing a training solution to cover the full spectrum of combat operations up to the anti-access aerial-denial (A2AD) arena. Part of the phased training approach will see the introduction of highly manoeuvrable transonic drones,” company CEO Habib Boukharouba told Jane’s .

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