The only dedicated European exercise for the C-27J Spartan military transport aircraft launches today for two weeks of intensive joint training. Now in its seventh edition, the ‘European Spartan Exercise’ will take place at 90th airlift base - Otopeni, Romania with four participating nations: Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, and Lithuania. In this edition, the European Spartan Exercise will be tailored to the Tactical air transport including air Medevac.
The European Spartan Exercise brings together three C-27J’s and around 150 personnel and will run from 2-12 October and marking the second time Romania has hosted the exercise. The core planning team composed of personnel from participating nations and the EDA already began work on 27 September for final preparations of the exercise. All planning cells include a representative of the participating nations, while medical personnel will plan dedicated missions for medical evacuation.
Tactical training
The C-27J Spartan transport aircraft is designed to perform tactical missions in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, providing direct air transport to the theatre, day and night. The Spartan Exercise is also focused on peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, training C-27J crews to fly low level tactical navigation in different scenarios. The second week of the exercise will be dedicated to Tactical Medevac activities. Several airfields in Romania have been chosen for training with crews due to perform tactical approaches, material (CDS) and personnel airdrops, also using unprepared runway and short airfield for take-off and landing.
European C-27J community
This annual flying exercise, which is part of the EDA’s dedicated C-27J project that gathers five participating Member States that are C-27J users (the four afore-mentioned countries plus Slovakia), works to identify and develop common projects in the domains of operations, training, logistics, procurement, airworthiness and Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research (SESAR) to achieve a high level of interoperability and cost-efficient operating and maintenance models.
EDA’s wider role
EDA supports all EU Member States in improving their defence capabilities through European cooperation. Acting as an enabler and facilitator for Ministries of Defence willing to engage in collaborative capability projects, the Agency has become the hub for European defence cooperation with expertise and networks spanning the whole spectrum of defence capabilities.
Member States use EDA as an intergovernmental expert platform where their collaborative projects are supported, facilitated, and implemented. For more details, please see here.