Posted on 05/10/2015 6:01:14 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
David Cameron and George Osborne will be persuaded to part with the cash to buy a fleet of jets to hunt Vladimir Putin's nuclear submarines, which have regularly been patrolling the coast of Britain in recent months.
Often the Russian underwater vessels have only been discovered after colliding with private boats and now Government ministers are eager to plug the gap in defences with aircraft to track them.
Around a dozen top of the range planes will be bought for the RAF over the next two years.
These are likely to include the US developed Boeing Poseidon P8, designed for 'long-range anti-submarine warfare' and worth around £150million each.
The P8 jets look for magnetic fields under the water's surface.
Despite the promise of more austerity cuts in the coming months, the Government has been persuaded to invest in submarine detection due to increased aggression by Putin's forces.
BOEING
The Boeing Poseidon P8 is likely to join the RAF's fleet in the next two years
The most recent saw a fishing boat almost sunk off the Isle of Man when a submarine got caught in its net last month.
A similar incident involved a trawler just off the coast of Scotland weeks earlier.
A senior defence source told The Sun: "There have been several occasions in the last five years where foreign submarines have entered British water.
"They have been detected more by chance than anything else because we have no means of monitoring their activity."
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said the "full spectrum of submarine detection capability" would be reviewed this year.
Yesterday, Putin displayed the full scale of the military power available to him during the annual Victory Day parade in Moscow's Red Square.
The ex-KGB spy also accused the West of "ignoring" international rules in a speech likely to inflame tensions with Western powers.
Relations between Russia and Britain, the US and their Nato allies are at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War following Putin's invasion of Ukraine's Crimea region last year.
Is that really the best way to track submarines?
I’m surprised that the RAF never purchased P-3 Orion aircraft to begin with.
They hand the Avro Shackleton that filled that role for decades. And the Nimrod may have been its successor until retired a few years ago.
Wasn’t aware that any version of the Comet was still around.
It’s about time the UK stepped up.
Having to call on FRANCE a few months for help looking for subs off the UK coast was very embarrassing for the Brits.
From what I saw of the UK election, expect the SNP and libs to scream bloody murder about it.
It’s barely five years since the complete production run, including I think several nearly-ready planes, of an updated version of the Nimrod was scrapped in the same round of cuts which ditched the Harriers.
Would be a cool idea to bring back the old PBY Catalina flying boats
Only the Nimrod’s wing derives from the Comet IV. The Nimrod has been a superb multi-role maritime aircraft for 40 years until 2010. Loitering capabilities particularly impressive.
The RAF had the Nimrod, a truly outstanding anti-submarine aircraft in its own right.
I thought that was an optional extra
It’s my understanding that the P-8A does not have a “magnetic anomaly detection” capability, but the P-8I (India/International) does.
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They had their own Maritime patrol aircraft, based on the old "Comet" airliner. They phased it out due to cuts in defense spending, and apparently never replaced it.