KMW makes first deliveries for Hungarian army's new artillery and tank simulation centre

Rear view of KMW's PzH 2000 turret trainer, shown without the surrounding screen. (KMW)

Delivery of systems to the Hungarian army's new integrated tank/howitzer simulation centre has begun, Janes has learnt, with the PzH 2000 howitzer turret trainer having passed factory acceptance tests.

In December 2018, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) was awarded a contract by the Hungarian army to supply 44 Leopard 2A7 main battle tanks (MBTs) and 24 PzH 2000 howitzers. The contract also included the provision of an integrated simulation centre for both platforms, similar to those KMW had provided for Qatar following a comparable contract awarded in 2013. The simulation centre is at Tata, the base of the Hungarian army's 25th Infantry Brigade, which will use the new platforms.

Speaking to Janes at the 2022 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Claudia Zehntner, KMW manager for training and simulation sales and proposal management said that the project had two phases. The first is the installation of the PzH 2000 turret trainers, which is due to be completed by late 2023. This will be followed by the Leopard 2A7HU turret trainers, the factory acceptance test for which is due in early 2024, with the whole facility due to be completed by late 2024.

Although Zehntner would not confirm the exact numbers of turret trainers for either the howitzers or the MBTs, she explained that each one was a high-fidelity simulator with an accompanying driver simulator to enable an entire vehicle crew to be trained together. There are also separate high-fidelity driver training simulators on electrically driven six-degrees-of-freedom motion platforms to provide a separate individual driver training capability.