US awards Texan II contract for Tunisia

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded Textron USD12.5 million related to Tunisia's T-6C Texan II programme.

A contract related to the procurement of eight T-6C Texan II trainer aircraft for Tunisia has been awarded. Potentially another four could be added to that number at a later date, or that option might be taken up with the AT-6 Wolverine instead. (Textron)

Announced on 11 June, the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) award provides for the procurement of long-lead production items and spares to support delivery of eight T-6Cs to the North African nation in 2022, as well as conducting an in-country site survey for basing.

Work will be performed in Wichita, Kansas, and is expected to be completed by October 2022.

The contract comes about 19 months after the US State Department approved the sale of up to 12 Texan II trainer aircraft to Tunisia for an estimated USD234 million. “The proposed sale will replace Tunisia's ageing trainer fleet and allow Tunisia to continue training pilots to support Tunisia's counter-terrorism and border security missions,” the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in October 2019. Apart from this approval for the trainer variant T-6C, the US government approved four AT-6 Wolverine light attack versions of the aircraft for Tunisia in February 2020 .

Both the T-6C and AT-6 share an 85% commonality in structure, avionics, and other systems, and are expected to replace the Tunisian Air Force's (Al‐Quwwat al‐Jawwiya al‐Jamahiriyah At'Tunisia) fleet of Aero L-39 Albatros and SIAI-Marchetti SF 260 Warrior aircraft that have been in service since 1995 and 1974 respectively.