Super Tucano Counter-Insurgency Plane Makes Inroads Into Africa

Embraer’s EMB-314 Super Tucano trainer and light attack turboprop continues to rack up global orders, solidifying its position as the globe’s pre-eminent manned counter-insurgency aircraft. The latest order set of about $180 million expands the plane’s footprint into 3 African states: Angola, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania. They join Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Indonesia as customers for this aircraft.

The Super Tucano is known as the A-29 or ALX in Brazil, but abroad, it’s the EMB 314 successor to Embraer’s widely-used EMB 312 Tucano trainer. The Super Tucano offers better flight performance, armoring and wing-mounted machine guns, plus weapons integration with advanced surveillance and targeting pods, precision-guided bombs, and even air-to-air missiles. This makes it an excellent territorial defense and close support plane for low-budget air forces, as well as a surveillance asset with armed attack capability. Brazil uses it this way, for instance, alongside very advanced EMB-145 airborne radar and maritime patrol jet platforms. Meanwhile, in Africa…

In March 2012, Embraer announced that the total value of all 3 contracts, including “extensive” support, training, and replacement parts packages, comes to “more than $180 million.”

Angola, on Africa’s southwestern coast, has ordered 6 Super Tucanos for counter-insurgency roles, with the first 3 to be delivered in 2012.

Angola is an authoritarian regime, and the country’s economy would be in desperate shape if not for recent oil drilling activity off of its coasts. A 2010 report by the conservative US Heritage Foundation tabbed Angola as China’s #1 supplier of oil, passing Saudi Arabia. The country went through a long civil war that lasted from the 1980s to 2002, and the northern enclave of Cabinda is still a focus of separatist activity. The regime maintains a sizable and advanced fighter force by African standards, but questions abound as to how many of the of those Soviet and Russian fighters are still operational.

Burkina Faso is a landlocked country in West Africa. They have already received their 3 Super Tucanos, and are using them on border patrol missions. Adding the Super Tucanos gives the country operational fixed-wing combat aircraft again, though they’re also an AT-802 Air Tractor customer. The AT-802U variant can easily be reconfigured for armed roles, or act as the locust sprayer the country’s AT-802 was purchased to be. In that part of the world, the locusts are a security risk that can easily measure up to any regional turmoil.

Burkina Faso has a good record of free and fair elections by African standards, and dealt with widespread spring 2011 protests through the political process. Its neighbors are Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, and Togo, some of whom harbor regional turmoil that risks spilling over. The Super Tucanos should help to keep an eye on things, and provide a low-key deterrent to trouble. The country also works to hedge this risk by being a member of the USA’s Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership (TSCTP).

Mauritania, on Africa’s northwest coasts, is simply mentioned as a customer that “chose the A-29 Super Tucano to carry out counter-insurgency missions.” The country has a very small air force, and its 3-4 ex-French EMB 312 Tucano aircraft are old. Given the overall order total given, and generally understood costs for the Super Tucano, they may have bought just 1 aircraft, or even no aircraft for now.

The country is active in the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom – Trans Sahara (OEF-TS), including operations across borders in cooperation with its neighbor Mali, and a number of skirmishes in Mauritania with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. This has been a balancing act for the USA, which has also issued reports citing Mauritania’s Arab rulers for organized repression of its black population, up to and including slavery and human trafficking. That’s a very old pattern for the area, but remains no less distressing in modern times.

Original link: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Super-Tucano-Counter-Insurgency-Plane-Makes-Inroads-Into-Africa-07348/#more-7348