NATO’s increasingly obsolete aircraft to get one last, billion-dollar overhaul

BRUSSELS — NATO and U.S. aircraft-maker Boeing agreed Wednesday a $1-billion (U.S.) contract to refurbish the military alliance’s aging fleet of surveillance planes, ensuring that they can continue to serve as the organization’s eye in the sky until 2035.

The agreement, which was not actually signed Wednesday, was made public just days before U.S. President Donald Trump joins his NATO counterparts in London for a Dec. 4 summit marking the 70th anniversary of the world’s biggest security alliance.

Trump is expected to make fresh demands on his European and Canadian partners to significantly step up defence spending.

NATO’s contract announcement provides a timely reminder that money is going to Boeing, although other European contractors will be involved in the refurbishment, which is expected to be completed by 2027.

Purchased in 1977 at the height of the Cold War, when Jimmy Carter became U.S. president and as a missile crisis with the then Soviet Union was beginning to fester in Europe, the 14 Boeing E-3 planes cost almost $8 billion.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters at a military airport outside Brussels the upgrade will provide the Airborne Warning and Control planes, known as AWACS, “with sophisticated new communications and networking capabilities so these aircraft can continue their vital mission and contribute to our security.”

Beyond their role as NATO’s eye in the sky, the planes can be used for air-policing, support in counter-terrorism or evacuation operations, and provide help during natural disasters. They can stay aloft for 8 hours at a time and watch over an area of more than 300,000 square kilometres.

Developed years before the internet and mobile telephones were in common use, they seem almost quaint in an age where a pilotless drone has flown for 40 consecutive hours and stealth technologies wreak havoc with many modern surveillance systems.

But the maintenance program will see their computer hardware and software upgraded to turn around double the intelligence information, data and imagery that they currently handle, whether it be of air, ground, sea or space origin.

The surveillance aircraft, which are based in Germany, are among the few military assets that NATO owns as an alliance.

NATO experts have warned for years that this plane-based surveillance platform will not work after 2035. They have urged the alliance’s 29 member nations to quickly decide how to replace the fleet by then, given the roughly 20-year time gap required to develop new surveillance technologies.