Leading a formation of British Aerospace demo aircrafts

Development aircraft for armed maritime patrolling

Painted in camo c/s and displayed with the 'RAMS 3000' surname. It featured a Lucas turret housing a 12.7 mm Browning heavy machine gun with 450 rounds of ammunition. Pylons on either side for a total of eight anti-tank missiles, typically HOT 2, though the pylons could also carry TOW missiles. Air-to-air missiles, rocket pods, and forward-firing cannons could also be carried on these pylons. Weapons associated to a SFIM APX-M397 stabilised thermal sight as well as an additional mast-mounted sight and digital weapons controls avionics. Other systems included an infrared jammer and chaff/flare/ECM system, a Racal Prophet radar warning system and a Racal RAMS 3000 Series avionics management system. Thanks to Joachim Lippl for tech notes.

To become A7-BCB

To be noticed that the AMX prototypes wore different format of construction numbers painted on the tail. The first two prototypes wore N.C.001 and N.C.002. From the third onward the construction number became N.C.A03, A04, A05...

Note the spraying system installed on the horizontal stabilizer. This aircraft was used in this period by Aeritalia to test a spraying system to counter the pollution spreading of hydrocarbons on the sea. Later flew on 24th september 1999 converted as one of the two C-27J development aircraft with the new Rolls Royce AE2100D2 turpoprops. It suffered a bad landing on 21st september 2000. It was then demolished in 2006.