India to open combat aircraft deal bids on Friday

New Delhi: The Defence Ministry will open commercial bids of the two short-listed aircraft manufacturers on Friday taking the country closer to its acquisition plans of 126 multirole combat aircraft. Commercial bids of European Eurofighter and French Rafale will be opened in the afternoon in the presence of their representatives, Defence Ministry said. After opening the bids, the Defence Ministry will start calculating the Life Cycle Cost (LCC) of the two aircraft, which is to be operated for 40 years or 6,000 hours, they said.[caption id=“attachment_122835” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Eurofighter. Valentin Flauraud/Reuters”]  [/caption] Final commercial negotiations with the L-1 vendor (lowest bidder) will begin before the contract is ready for signing before the end of this fiscal. Decks were cleared for opening the commercial bids after the Defence Acquisitions Council, chaired by Defence Minister A K Antony, approved the offsets evaluation reports of the Eurofighter Typhoon (backed by UK, Germany, Spain and Italy) and the French Rafale jets on 7 October. The other contenders including the American, Russian and Swedish jets were rejected by the IAF on the basis of their performance in the field evaluation trials. As per the RFP, the first 18 jets will be supplied by the winning bidder from its own facilities whereas the remaining would be manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd in India. PTI