An armed C-130? The French go for it
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עברית (Hebrew)
A French company is offering the country’s air force to equip its Lockheed Martin C-130 transport aircraft with smart weapons.
Sagem has a proposal to put smart weapons on French Air Force’s Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.
The upgrade would include arming the Hercules with the SSA-1101 Gerfaut system, allowing the C-130 to carry and deploy as many as eight Sagem AASM precision guided munitions (PGMs). The SSA-1101 Gerfaut has been under development since 2012.
“We can guarantee a range of 30 km for an AASM dropped at 25,000 ft and 190 kt,” a Sagem official told IHS Jane’s. The company will soon make an unsolicited bid to the French defense procurement agency, the DGA, outlining its armed-Hercules proposal.
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Computer simulations conducted in 2014 confirmed the aerodynamic loading and the possibility to drop 250 kg bombs from the cargo aircraft, Sagem said. Four PGMs could be carried under each wing in place of the external fuel tank.
The aircraft would use the Rafaut AUF-2 adaptor – already used on the Mirage 2000Ds – allowing two bombs to be carried. A 5.8 m support structure, which has yet to be developed by Rafaut, would provide the interface between both AUF-2 and the C-130 wing pylon.
The U.S Air Force (USAF) is using a C-130 transport aircraft equipped with a cannon. The Lockheed AC-130 gunship is a heavily armed ground-attack aircraft variant of the C-130 Hercules transport plane. The basic airframe is manufactured by Lockheed, while Boeing is responsible for the conversion into a gunship and for aircraft support.
