Prague, Sept 23 (CTK) – The Aero Vodochody will provide the maintenance of 24 L-159 Alca and four L-39 Albatros planes of the Czech military until November 2022, based on a two billion crown contract it signed with the Defence Ministry on Thursday, daily Pravo writes Friday.
“Aero Vodochody is one of our key domestic partners. The contract guarantees a long-term provision of maintenance by the aircraft producer,” Defence Minister Martin Stropnicky told the paper.
Aero will also turn three one-seat L-159s into two-seat trainers. The ministry will pay further half a billion crowns for the conversion of the three planes and it should receive the L-159 T2 versions by December 2018.
Stropnicky said the Czech air force will then have 16 one-seat and eight two-seat L-159s.
The ministry and Aero negotiated several months about the deal.
Until now, the maintenance of the L-159 aircraft cost approximately 250 million crowns a year. The six-year contract should not exceed 2.033 billion crowns, Pravo writes.
The Czech military now has nine L-39s, but it plans to keep only four of them for training of new pilots.
In 1997, a contract for the making of 72 L-159s was signed with Aero and the military paid about 50 billion crowns for them. After several years, however, the army decided to use only 24 of them.
The remaining L-159 aircraft were mothballed and the ministry kept trying to sell them for many years, in which it finally succeeded.
Fifteen L-159s were sold to the Iraqi military that uses them to fight the Islamic State militant group. A team of Czech pilots and technicians left for Iraq in order to train the Iraqi pilots on the planes. The U.S. firm Draken bought 21 L-159s for the training of U.S. pilots. Two L-159s crashed and parts of six planes were used for the conversion into two-seat trainers.
($1=24.046 crowns)
