News Aereonautica Militare (Italian Air Force)

JFoulke

Member
I open this thread as a place to talk about news about the Italian Air Force.

As is known since a while, Italy has reduced its order to 90 total F-35, 60 F-35A CTOL and 30 F-35B STOVL.
Till now the Air Force would is said to recieve all of the 60 CTOL plus 15 of the STOVL, this decision has lifted a lot of controvercies because would leave the Marine with only 15 fighters that wouldn't even constitute an entire carrier wing neither for the Cavour, neither for the future LHD Trieste.
(both can carry a max of 12/14 Fighters, but you need to count 3/4 aircrafts are for spare and 1/2 for training).
Rumors are going around that a discussion is going on trying to leave all of 30 B variant for the Marine so that could constitute an entire fighter wing for a carrier and also have 6/8 fighters for the other carrier.
The problem is that the airforce doesn't want to give up on its 15 fighters at least that it's replaced by 15 more CTOL variant.

(the first italian F-35) https://arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/UZVYNW6XGJGJNLOJ5Y5SGFOOWM.jpg

(Cavour Carrier) http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rExptDfCE...Cyc/r4CeI7dg6fQ/s1600/Cavour+Levante+2012.jpg

On a different note, Italy has also ordered 20 new P1-HH Hammerhead drones for the airforce, it is produced by Piaggio Airspace, powered by two Whitney Canada PT6A-66B engines, 14 meters long, 15 meters wide and 4 meters high. 6100 kg max take off weight and 730km/h top speed.
The internal instruments is made by Selex ES, the navigation, flight and mission systems is the SkyISTAR and the radar is the SeaSpray 7300ER.

This 20 drones will be added to the italian airforce drone fleet that already consists of 8 Predator B (recently updated) 7 armed Reaper drones (recently updated) and other 3 P1-HH Hammerhead


(P1-HH Hammerhead) http://www.svolta.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/P.1HH-HammerHead-prototype-1024x681.jpg
 
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