India and USA signed final agreements for the purchase of two of the most advanced American helicopters in a deal worth about $3 billion. Contract for purchase of 15 Chinook and 22 Apache helicopters signed.
The deal value is worth about $3 billion (Rs 19,800 crore) and would be completed in four years. The agreements were signed in the headquarters of the Ministry of Defence in South Block. India will buy 22 Apache attack helicopters and 15 Chinooks to replace ageing Soviet-era aircraft.
The Boeing CH-47 Chinook is an American twin-engine, tandem rotor heavy-lift helicopter. Its primary roles are troop movement, artillery placement and battlefield resupply. It has a wide loading ramp at the rear of the fuselage and three external ventral cargo hooks. With a top speed of 170 knots (196 mph, 315 km/h), CH-47 is among the heaviest lifting Western helicopters. Its name is from the Native American Chinook people.
The Boeing AH-64 Apache is a four-blade, twin-turboshaft attack helicopter with a tailwheel-type landing gear arrangement, and a tandem cockpit for a two-man crew. It features a nose-mounted sensor suite for target acquisition and night vision systems. It is armed with a 30 mm (1.18 in) M230 chain gun carried between the main landing gear, under the aircraft’s forward fuselage. It has four hardpoints mounted on stub-wing pylons, typically carrying a mixture of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and Hydra 70 rocket pods. The AH-64 has a large amount of systems redundancy to improve combat survivability.
For the Chinook helicopters, the agreement was signed between representatives of MoD and Boeing. For Apache, there were two separate contracts —one between MoD and Boeing representatives and the other between the governments to cover parts of the deal under the Foreign Military Sales programme.
The Indian Air Force picked the Apache and Chinook helicopters over Russian competitors in 2012, but budget constraints had held back the deal until now.
The cabinet committee on security, headed by Mr Modi, gave the green light for the deal. The news comes as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s is on visit to the US. The purchase strengthens the status of the US as one of India’s top military suppliers. The deal had been on the backburner for the past five years.
The contracts mark yet another significant step in rapidly expanding military ties between the two sides that would be discomforting to China, while drawing the contours of a broader coalition emerging in the region. The US and Indian governments are now negotiating a series of defence collaboration projects.
