In a statement Monday, Germany's defence ministry confirmed talks with Canada were planned. No price tag or date was speculated but UAV cost $823 million to Germany.
The German defence ministry has decided to “begin concrete negotiations with Canada for the sale of Euro Hawk aircraft, two ground stations and possibly certain spare parts,” Associated Press reported Monday.
Last year, the government acknowledged that the development and procurement of the prototype, a signals-intelligence sensor called “ISIS” and spare parts, and the completion of seven test flights had cost about 681 million euros since 2007. A further 24 million euros were spent on preparing for a resumption of temporary test flights.
It is however claimed that the drone has already been “demilitarized.” This entailed the removal of American-made radio equipment, the GPS receiver and aerials, as well as all encryption and the flight control system. Rather than laboriously delete individual software components, technicians chose to perform a “hardware uninstallation” – removing all hard drives containing sensitive US-made software.
