IAR99 Soim strikes again
Today, the Romanian Air Force has ordered 24 updated IAR99 Soim ground attack trainers from Avioane SA Craiova. IAR99 Soim, the subsonic jet trainer and ground attack aircraft produced by Avioane SA craiova is the first 100% romanian designed/built jet aircraft, and it was developed in the 1980s. The upgraded version of this aircraft includes exactley the technology mounted on the MiG21 Lancer because the new IAR99 was especially developed in order to be the trainer for the Lancer pilots. Once a pilot already has a certain nomber of hrs on the Soim, he can pass on the Lancer. (saying "he" because there aren't any female fighter pilots in the RoAF, only seven chopper pilots)
The Romanian Armed Forces very often spends its money on Romanian built weapons, even if the Romanian weapons are good or not, just because in this country there still is the ideology that if a producer fails, the Army has to buy its products, good or bad, just to keep that producer off bankruptcy. That's why the Romanian Ground Forces have bought hundreds of Roman low-tech trucks in the past 10yrs, and still, Roman SA is a bankrupt company due to the incompetence of the managers who kicked out the Volvo company when they wanted to buy Roman in 1994. And the list with such examples could go on and on forever. Hopefuly, this will not be the case with this deal, because the Air Force needed more updated IAR99s to train its Lancer pilots, and besides Avioane SA has an entire list of orders for the Soim, with the condition that somebody else buys them first too, so now that the Air Force of Romania has bought them, they are demonstrated to be fully functionaly, so hopefuly, a lot of orders will flow in soon. But there's a catch: romanians have no conception of the word "progress", so instead of using the new income in new projects for the future, all they will do with those money will be raising salaries and building new appartments for the employees, things which got the company (as many other companies in Romania) to bankruptcy in the first places... It seems that "one never learns" really has its deal in this one... too bad.
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