In the run up to Farnborough 2016, CAE announced two important contracts with the government of the United Arab Emirates. The nation’s Joint Aviation Command, which operates a variety of platforms including the Sikorsky BLACK HAWK and UH-60M helicopters and the NorthStar Aviation 407MRH, has developed to the point at which it requires its own training capability at the command level. The solution adopted focuses on the instructor pilots being provided by the military themselves, with CAE contracted to provide a comprehensive ground-based training system.
Alongside this win – and perhaps more importantly from a strategic perspective, the company also won a contract for the provision of an all-embracing naval training centre solution for the UAE’s maritime forces. Providing the UAE with its first distributed training capability, covering all classes of surface vessel and providing an architecture that includes CAE’s Common Database embedded throughout the synthetic environment and a comprehensive learning management system, this contract builds gracefully on the efforts the company has been devoting to leveraging its modelling, simulation and training systems expertise into the naval environment. It follows a recent success in providing naval warfare training facilities to the Swedish Navy.
Between them, these contracts represent, “a huge strategic shift in emphasis for CAE,” in the words of Ian Bell, Vice President responsible for the company’s defence and security activities in Europe, Middle East and Africa. “They also provide a strategic vote of confidence in our core competencies from a very well educated customer. We have spent a long time developing the right levels of trust and the right partnerships in country – and we can now deliver a capability to the customer that provides them with a sound basis for maturing and enhancing capabilities for their aviation and naval forces.”
CAE has a long tradition of supplying training capability to the UAE through the Foreign Military Sales system. These contracts, however, represent a successful return to ‘direct supply’ that has been a decade in the making.
Picture shows how CAE will develop and build a naval training centre for the UAE that will provide comprehensive, distributed training capabilities across all the nation’s classes of surface vessels
