These are the first military aircraft to be designed and built in SA in nearly two decades
Paramount Aerospace’s Ivor Ichikowitz at Ysterlaat Base in Cape Town. File picture: SUNDAY TIMES/AMBROSE PETERS.
The first of the propeller-driven reconnaissance, surveillance and precision strike aircraft will be delivered this week, Paramount announced on the sidelines of the Africa Aerospace and Defence show in Pretoria. The defence sector once played a major role in SA’s economy — a legacy of the apartheid regime’s need to produce locally due to embargoes — and boasted one of the world’s most diversified non-aligned arms industries.
The Rooivalk, an attack helicopter developed by state-owned defence company Denel in the 1980s, was the last military aircraft designed and manufactured in SA. It never reached large-scale production and manufacturing ended in the early 2000s.