Romania buying five F-16s from Portugal

jurryaany · by **jurryaany** » 20 Apr 2019, 20:53

Romanian defense minister Gabriel Les announced the country is to acquire five F-16 aircraft from Portugal, possibly before the end of the year.

Source from Romania: https://www.romania-insider.com/index.p ... 6-portugal

Source from Portugal: https://econews.pt/2018/07/17/portugal- ... o-romania/

A specific type isn't mentioned in the articles, yet it's only logical they would also be AM/BM models, like the 12 they have procured from Portugal already.

Patriot · by **Patriot** » 21 Apr 2019, 11:10

To be more acurate, they aquired 9 F-16s from Portugal and 3 other were from AMARG which were upgraded to MLU standard by Portugal before being hand over to Romania.

Well, I thought they're gonna buy rather new F-16s. Also 5 additiinal airframes isnt enough to replace MiG-21 fleet

Bjorn · by **Bjorn** » 21 Apr 2019, 13:29

Patriot wrote:To be more acurate, they aquired 9 F-16s from Portugal and 3 other were from AMARG which were upgraded to MLU standard by Portugal before being hand over to Romania.

This is not correct. All 12 airframes are former Portuguese airframes. None came from AMARG directly and they were all bought by Portugal years ago long before Romania was looking for used F-16s.

Greets,

Patriot · by **Patriot** » 21 Apr 2019, 22:52

Thanks for claryfying that. My bad :doh:

I was almost sure I had it right or at least at some point in time they were offered with AMARG jets

Bjorn · by **Bjorn** » 22 Apr 2019, 08:15

It is true that this 9/3 division was stated during the process. But this simply wasn't the case in the end. But I understand the confusion since it was published this way (also in official documents at the time).

Greets,

jurryaany · by **jurryaany** » 23 Apr 2019, 22:46

Patriot wrote:Well, I thought they're gonna buy rather new F-16s. Also 5 additiinal airframes isnt enough to replace MiG-21 fleet

More F-16s is definitely on the agenda, word has it that the total to be procured in addition to the ones already received would be 36.

Source: https://www.janes.com/article/87199/rom ... onal-f-16s

I don't think Romania would be able to acquire 36 F-16s from Portugal alone, but it looks like this procurement of five ex-Portuguese F-16s is a step in the process.