Rosoboronexport

A digital impression of Leonardo’s MC-27J gunship concept.

roUGh tranSPortS Stand readY to do VioLence

Airbus has joined the sparse ranks of airframers offering ISR gunship versions of their seemingly benign transport aircraft.

Martin Streetly

Airbus Defence and Space’s late June 2021 announcement that it had updated the armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) variant of its C295 transport aircraft shone a spotlight on an interesting sub-species of transport-based ‘special mission’ platforms, namely the ISR ‘gunship’. The gunship concept originated during the south-east Asian conflict of the 1960s and 1970s and made use of transport aircraft equipped with multiple machine guns and cannon to provide fire-support for troops-in-action. While highly successful in this and other roles, such aircraft were extremely vulnerable to any form of anti-aircraft defence other than small arms, with the United States (US) losing some 25 gunships to ground fire and surface-to-air missiles between January 1965 and December 1972. The game changer for the current generation of armed ISR platforms is their ability to carry air-tosurface missiles which gives them a greatly enhanced stand-off capability when being used to conduct ‘responsive defence, counterinsurgency and border surveillance and security’ missions. To illustrate the gunship genre, this article will examine the AC-235, Lockheed Martin’s AC-130J Ghostrider, Airbus’s latest C295 concept and Leonardo aircraft’s MC-27J.

Lockheed Martin ac-130J

The AC-130J makes use of a modified C-130J airframe and is designed for close air