Publication: The Star Issued: Date: 2007-04-07 Reporter: Michael Schmidt

Rooivalk Down

 

Publication 

The Star
Date

2007-04-07

Reporter

 Michael Schmidt

Web Link

www.thestar.co.za

 

Defence experts had long warned that the chopper would prove - dare we say it - a turkey, writes Michael Schmidt

It was a case of Rooivalk Down when Denel failed late last Friday in its desperate bid to rescue its aviation business after Turkey rejected the attack helicopter in favour of a European competitor.

Defence experts had long warned that the Rooivalk would prove - dare we say it - a turkey, when pitted against the competition: the not-as-agile Franco-German Eurocopter Tiger and, especially, the rather light Anglo-Italian AugustaWestland Mangusta A129 International (the Russian Kamov KA 50/2 Black Shark is still at the prototype stage).

This is because the Turkish armed forces fly several other AugustaWestland models, so the synergies with the Mangusta appeared obvious.

Not so, said Jane's Defence Weekly writer Helmoed-Römer Heitman: the Rooivalk's engine is the French-made Super Puma/Cougar powertrain - and Turkey also flies a lot of Cougars. In fact, he said, the Rooivalk was a superior attack helicopter to the Mangusta - which appears to be in line to win the bid - because it is a "faster, more agile, longer-range and more robust aircraft".

If so, why did the Rooivalk lose this $2-billion (R14,2-billion) deal to supply Turkey with up to 50 attack and reconnaissance helicopters? Politics and poor marketing? Heitman asked.

"In the 1990s, South Africa cancelled a whole bunch of export permits to Turkey because [then deputy defence minister] Ronnie Kasrils got upset when Turkey arrested a PKK leader [Abdullah Ocalan] and sentenced him to death.

"This was criminally stupid because Turkey was also interested in the Rooikat [armoured fighting vehicle], in our ground-based air defences and mine- protected vehicles in vast quantities. It was a breach of contract, a betrayal that in Turkish eyes made us appear unreliable."

And yet the Rooivalk has lost out time and again. It was notoriously used by the British a few years back as a bargaining chip at the Farnborough air show to reduce the cost of American Apache attack helicopters.

"Also," Heitman said, "there is the fact that the Rooivalk has been around for 15 years and is still not operational, partly because the bottom dropped out of the defence budget as it made its appearance, and because the SAAF itself wanted all the money spent on its fighter jet programme instead."

The SAAF is now well on its way to making its 28 Gripen multi-role fighters operational *1, but with only 12 Rooivalks in service with 16 Squadron in Bloemfontein, its close air-support and ground-attack capabilities are limited, Heitman believes.

The inevitable eventual deployments of the Rooivalk in such roles as part of our African peacekeeping missions required another 12 Rooivalks so that at least 16 are hot-to-go, while others are in maintenance or being used for training.

The Rooivalk is not the only arrow in Denel Aviation's quiver: it has especially high hopes for its fifth-generation A-Darter air-to-air missile (Brazil has expressed interest) and for its Seeker II aerial unmanned vehicle, a class of remotely piloted drone that was all the rage at last year's Africa Aerospace and Defence Exhibition in Cape Town (probably because Israeli UAV targeting had proved so pin-point accurate in the war on Lebanon a few months earlier).

And yet, despite Denel CEO Shaun Liebenberg putting on a brave face when announcing the failure to secure the Turkish deal - saying "we still believe Rooivalk is a world-class helicopter" and that collaboration with Turkey would continue in missile, munitions, artillery and landmine-clearance technologies - it certainly will raise the overall operational expense to the SAAF of flying the Rooivalk.

It has also emphasised that while the South African defence sector has produced excellent products, notably its mine-protected vehicles such as the Rooikat, its artillery systems such as the G5 and G6, and its avionics, during the apartheid era it largely followed the "Japanese model" of building technical capacity by reverse-engineering what others had already invented. Examples include:

The Cheetah-C jet fighter, which the Gripens are replacing, was simply an Israeli Kfir with a few South African avionics and a different radar and engine, disguised to sidestep the arms embargo;

The Oryx helicopter, which is essentially a French Puma with a better engine;

The R-1 rifle was based on the old Belgian FN, while the R-4 and R-5 assault rifles were knock-offs of the Israeli Galil - and they, ironically, all based their basic gas-operated mechanism on the trusty AK-47.

And still, despite presenting a rather "ramshackle" appearance to potential foreign clients like Turkey, as Heitman put it, Denel soldiers on. This is despite having posted a loss of R1,6-billion in 2005 (of which the Rooivalk accounted for a third) and having to be propped up with a R1,5-billion bank guarantee and a R2-billion recapitalisation at taxpayers' expense.

In June last year, Denel entered into an agreement with Swedish arms firm Saab to create a new "aerostructures" company to be initially 80% South African-owned and 20% Swedish-owned - with the Swedes investing R66-million over the first two years and Denel four times that amount.

Based at Denel Aviation's facilities at O R Tambo International Airport and with 600 staff, the new company is expected to generate an initial annual income of R200-million from work on Saab's Gripen, as well as the Airbus 400M transport, AugustaWestland helicopter and Hawk lead-in-fighter trainer programmes for the SANDF - plus doing work for Boeing.

But though Denel and Saab trumpeted the deal as one that would see great skills-transfer to the beleaguered South African defence industry, with 600 Denel staff being the beneficiaries, defence analyst Leon Engelbrecht cynically quipped in his unauthorised, unpublished Guide to the SANDF that "Denel existed to keep people employed, not to arm South Africa".

Last month, Denel announced it had entered into partnership with German optics company Carl Zeiss, forming Carl Zeiss Optronics (Pty) Ltd, in which the Germans will have a 70% stake and Denel 30%. With an initial capitalisation of R60-million over three years, the new company would produce optical and optical-electronic systems primarily for the security and defence sector.

But Heitman said last year that the overall trend of foreign buy-in meant both the erosion of South Africa's strategic edge and the downgrading of its industry from a systems-level supplier to that of a component supplier.

International participation on building systems component by component is the way the entire world's arms industry is going (except the Americans, who are largely self-sustaining). Yet Denel's other big coup last year, the R36-million deal to produce 129-million brass cups for British firm BAE Land Systems, demonstrates Heitman's point: instead of producing actual ammunition, Denel was reduced to producing only the brass cups, the first and most basic stage in manufacturing cartridges.

A related argument could be made regarding Denel allowing the United States to produce our world-beating long-range base-bleed artillery ammunition under licence: though Denel creams the royalties, the knowledge (like that of our helicopter air filters that saved Desert Storm aircrews in the first Gulf War) has gone west and will eventually be reverse-engineered there without any benefit accruing to South Africa.

Heitman said one 16 Squadron Rooivalk pilot with experience on the Apache said the South African chopper beat the American competition hands down. But it will take more than the confidence of combat pilots to get the Rooivalk - and Denel - flying again.

With acknowledgements to Michael Schmidt and The Star.


*1       Nonsense - it will only get its first Gripen in 2008 and then at a few per year.

The Gripen will be militarily operational in one squadron in 2012 and a second squadron in 2015.

But the biggest tragedy for the RSA is that the DoD and SANDF have absolutely no clue of how to manage the indigenous defence industry, including both Denel and Armscor.

Essentially, the defence industry has one client, i.e. the SANDF, SAPS and export sales are a tiny bit of cream if one is lucky.

But it is actually all quite simple :
Where there's a will, there's a way.