Serbia will build new hangars for Rafale multirole fighter jets at the Colonel-pilot Milenko Pavlović Air Base in the city of Batajnica. In addition, a refurbishment of existing aprons and taxiways is in the plans Serbian Ministry of Defense confirmed on an inquiry from the Tango Six website.
The article provides insights into cost estimates for this project and compares it to a similar undertaking by Croatia. It also illustratively presents how much a country needs to spend on infrastructure to transition from Soviet aircraft to the modern French fighter.
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For starters, let's recall that Serbia had ordered 12 Rafales from France for EUR 225 million per aircraft on August 30, 2024, divided into several payments: an initial €470 million in 2025, then another €752 million in 2026, and €820.5 million in 2027. The deliveries will take place in 2028-2029.
Meanwhile, the costs of building new and adapting existing hangars for Rafale are currently listed by Tango Six as follows: €2.7 million in 2025, ~€4 million in 2026, and €10.9 million in 2027 — for a total of €17.6 million.
In comparison, the construction of new specialized aircraft housing premises in Croatia, which has been receiving Rafale jets as well, took €37 million out of the country's budget. On top of the hangars themselves, Croatian facilities "contain everything necessary for the accommodation of the aircraft, their service and maintenance, the installation of simulators and the personnel's stay," the journalists noted. Serbian analogs are also expected to have utilities for housing and maintenance of the aircraft, storage of associated ground equipment, and personnel quarters.
Some other comparable projects undertaken by Serbia's neighboring countries are mentioned. For example, Romania took €32 million out of its pocket to adapt the Feteşti Air Base for the F-16, and Bulgaria's costs for the complete reconstruction of the Graf Ignatievo Air Base in waiting for F-16s have already amounted to €103 million. Against this background, the website concludes that Serbian planned construction budget is quite moderate in general.
Defense Express reminds you that Serbia is in transition from the old Soviet MiG-29 aircraft to the French Rafale. Interestingly, just in 2019, the Serbs were building brand new hangars for MiG-29s at the same Colonel-pilot Milenko Pavlović airfield in Batajnica.
In turn, Croatia is switching to the Rafale while simultaneously retiring all of its MiG-21 fighters, purchased from Ukraine in the 1990s, The old aircraft were withdrawn from combat service just this December.
The given estimates of investments needed to deploy infrastructure for Rafale are, in fact, the first openly published data on the costs encompassing the process of adopting this aircraft, making them particularly valuable, especially as these estimates come from the countries that are in transition from Soviet MiGs to Western-type fighters.
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