Three UK engineers have been awarded contracts worth £372m to maintain the Hawk jets used by the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy to train pilots before they migrate to fighter planes.
The bulk of the work went to BAE Systems (BA.). Europe's largest defence contractor bagged a five-year contract worth nearly £300m to provide in-service support and post-design services to the fleet of fast jet training aircraft, which it also happens to manufacture.
Its partner on the project, support services firm Babcock (BAB), will assist with maintaining the planes' software, while the other beneficiary was Rolls-Royce (RR.). The engineer will receive £79m for testing, repairing and overhauling the Adour engines that power the aircraft.
The Hawk, which is exported to countries ranging from India to Saudi Arabia, has been used to train more than 20,000 pilots in air forces across the world. Previously the RAF and Navy separately ran maintenance of these jets. But as defence contracts have since come under pressure from the austerity-driven UK government, the two wings now operate under the same roof.
The Ministry of Defence now has a bigger kitty of £178bn to spend on buying and maintaining equipment for the armed forces over the next decade. But a recently installed watchdog tasked with overseeing expensive contracts is threatening to weigh in on the amount of profit that can be generated by contractors. That means caps could soon be introduced to benchmark operating margins against international peers.
