MBDA to support Royal Navy Type 45 Sea Viper system
MBDA has received a £175 million contract from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) for further In-Service Support to the Sea Viper weapon system, securing a key capability of the Type 45 fleet.
Above:
Sea Viper firing from HMS Duncan.
Copyright MBDA
Called ‘Sea Viper Unified Support Environment Period 1’, the contract will cover the continuing in-service support to the Sea Viper weapon system, including the Aster missile that protects the Royal Navy’s Type 45 destroyers, for the next five years.
The Unified Support Environment (USE) is the principle of providing in-service support to UK MoD Weapon Systems and Missiles in a portfolio environment. The USE approach is designed to reduce support workload and administrative costs, and has already been successfully applied to several other MBDA programmes, including ASRAAM, Brimstone and Storm Shadow.
The work willsustain around 50 MBDA UK jobs, primarily at Stevenage, Portsmouth, and Bristol and will also involve a large number of UK companies in the supply chain as well as MBDA France and MBDA Italy.
MBDA is jointly owned by Airbus (37.5%), BAE Systems (37.5%) and Leonardo (25%) offers 45 missile systems and countermeasures products already in operational service and more than 15 others currently in development. In 2015 MBDA achieved a turnover of €3 billion with an order book of €15.9 billion.