Czech military: CASA planes' anti-missile defence fails in tests

The DAS anti-missile protection system of the Spanish CASA C-295M planes that the Czech armed forces acquired a couple of years ago has not passed military tests, the Defence Ministry said Tuesday.

The ministry is now negotiating with the producer and supplier of the aircraft about the way of removing the defects.

The DAS protection system has failed in seven out of the 17 checked areas.

The same system did not pass the military tests a year ago. Since then the producer has been trying to remove the defects.

The ministry claims that it cannot deploy the planes in a foreign mission in Afghanistan as the DAS is not functioning.

The final report on the failure in the repeated military tests of the CASAs was signed on Monday, the Defence Ministry says.

The ministry is now taking all possible steps to gain an adequate compensation for additional time to remove the defects, its spokesman Jan Pejsek said.

Moreover, the supplier, the Omnipol company that mediated the purchase, has had to pay sanctions of tens of thousands of crowns a day over the problems with the DAS system.

The purchase of three CASA C-295 planes for 3.5 billion crowns and the swap of five Czech-made L-159 subsonic fighters for the fourth CASA were approved by the Czech government in 2009.

The CASAs were grounded from last autumn following repeated defects.

In May, the defects of the planes' navigation and communication systems were definitively removed. Consequently, the planes can be used for training and transport of persons and material, but the DAS system defects prevent their deployment in foreign missions, Pejsek noted.

In January, the Defence Ministry agreed with the producer, the EADS consortium, and Omnipol on return of one of the Czech L-159s as a sanction for the CASAs' shortcomings. The plane is to return to the Czech Republic later in July, according to CTK information.

According to media, the acquisition of the CASAs was suspicious and the contract was probably overpriced.

The police recently asked the Chamber of Deputies to release former defence minister Parkanova for prosecution over the purchase of CASA planes for the military that was allegedly overpriced by 658 million crowns. The police say Parkanova did not have an expert opinion on the planes' price worked out.