Northrop Grumman has received a contract worth more than $370 million to produce a new airborne surveillance system for Germany, including the production of five Eurohawk unmanned air vehicles derived from the RQ-4B Global Hawk now in service with the US Air Force.



Announced by the US Department of Defense on 18 May, the foreign military sales contract will also cover the delivery of three mission control and launch and recovery elements for the Eurohawk signals intelligence aircraft, plus related equipment. Northrop has received an initial $185 million payment to commence work on the project, which is being performed under a collaborative Eurohawk GmbH effort with Europe’s EADS.

Initial production work under the Eurohawk deal is scheduled to conclude in March 2010, with the system to replace the German navy’s three Breguet Atlantic SIGINT-gathering aircraft. The current fleet has been in service since 1966, according to Flight’s MiliCAS database.

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