4 SAAB-2000 Erieye-ER for Pakistan Air Force | Indian VSHORADS Trials
Video from the channel International Defence Analysis about Saab 2000, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 9:25. Video type: News.
What's being announced
This defense news bulletin, narrated in Urdu, opens with the arrival at the Pakistan Air Force of four Saab 2000 airborne early warning and control aircraft purchased from Sweden. They carry the extended-range version of the Erieye radar, known as Erieye ER. According to the video, the first deliveries were made in October of the previous year and the aircraft has now formally entered service. One of them had been spotted weeks earlier in Athens.
Context
The new aircraft replace the Chinese-built ZDK-03 Karakoram Eagle, which carried a passive electronically scanned radar. The current Erieye is actively electronically scanned and is the same radar fitted to Saab's GlobalEye. The video attributes to the manufacturer a range of about 650 km, compared with 450 km for the previous version. It also cites improved detection of small targets amid jamming and electronic interference, and maritime surveillance capability with automatic identification system, electro-optical sensors and inverse synthetic aperture radar.
What it means
For Pakistan this means renewing its early warning fleet with a longer-range radar that also serves for maritime surveillance. The rest of the bulletin covers other matters: the Thales Ground Master 200 radar for Lithuania, Indonesia's suspension of its purchase of twelve Qatari Mirage 2000-5s, a US training program for Saudi Arabia, trials of the Indian VSHORADS system, South Korean exercises, and the purchase of 1,500 GBU-53/B StormBreaker bombs for the US Air Force.