The Ministry of Defence has published a tender for the purchase of a new small capacity cargo aircraft. An urgent necessity to transfer the senior officials of the Czech Republic and the Czech Army caused maybe an exceedingly quick tender. So, the sole interested person has been registered in the fourteen-day period. 

Picture: The Ministry of Defence has published a tender for the purchase of a new small capacity cargo aircraft (illustrative photo) | army.cz

“The Ministry of Defence has received the only quotation for purchasing a small cargo aircraft within the specified period for the submission of quotations. We are going to evaluate it and to take a decision on the following procedure,” said speaker of MoD Jan Pejšek. Mr. Pejšek hasn’t said yet who was this applicant. So by now only a requirement is known, of what you could read at our pages earlier. Let’s remember in short that it was an aircraft with a capacity of 14-19 persons, which could be lightly second-hand, with an air-raid up to 4000 hours and produced after 2012. The range of flight should be 9,000 kilometres. It is, thus, first of all a replacement for the soon-decommissioned JAK-40 and the very-expensively serviced Challenger, where service is provided till 2021.

Picture: Challenger 601-3A on service of the Czech Armed Forces | army.cz

Question-marks come out with regard to the quickness of the tender. A demand was published on  9/12/ 2019 and the dead-line for the submission of applications was determined to be at the latest of 9/27/ 2019. According to a professional, who was addressed by the E15 Daily News, it was too short time, for which the defence department could pay dearly. “The Ministry could pay dearly for the determination of a short dead-line, because companies may not have enough time to prepare their offers,“ said the professional in a field of public orders, who doesn’t want to be named. No matter what the department wants, by now the only quotation is received, and based on the market survey and submitted parameters, we might suppose that it could be one of the following aircraft. Bombardier Global Express, or Gulfstream G550. In the both cases, these are well-proven planes of the Business Jet class, which are used for the transport of officials in a lot of countries around the world.

Picture: Bombardier Global Express | pixabay.com with the author’s consent

Picture: Gulfstream G550 | Flickr with the owner’s consent

Let’s hope that the procurement won’t bring more problems than benefits and that thanks to legal processes won’t be elongated so that transport of the senior officials was threatened. The second question is whether one plane is enough, when the 24th Cargo Aviation Base in Prague – Kbely is going to inactivate in the next year a pair of the JAK-40 and most probably the service of the Challenger won’t be supported any more.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

The Ministry of Defense today (8th October 2019) canceled the tender for the purchase of a small transport aircraft for the transport of politicians. According to Defense Ministry spokesman Jan Pejsek, the offer of a single bidder did not meet the required parameters. The Office will launch a new tender in mid-October.