The French defense procurement agency DGA (Direction Générale de l’Armement) successfully tested and certified a new system to airdrop the Commandos Marine (French naval special forces)’s rigid-hull inflatable boats (RHIB), also known as ECUME, from an A400M military transport aircraft.
DGA press release
On March 25, the DGA successfully carried out a test of the ECUME release system (dubbed SLE) from the A400M. The aim was to test the new airdrop system’s packaging developed by the DGA in record time. Thanks to an operational and innovative solution developed in 6 weeks at lower cost, ECUME airdrop from the A400M is now certified.
The ECUME RHIB could already be airdropped from C130H aircraft. Following an initial phase of testing and experimentation at the end of 2024, the special forces asked the DGA to upgrade the system’s packaging.
The aim was to improve the conditioning of the airdrop system, without any major modification or impact on the performance of current systems, while using equipment already available within the armed forces.
In just six weeks, experts from the DGATA (DGA Techniques Aérospatiales – Aerospace Techniques), with the participation of the DGAEV (DGA Essais en vol – flight testing), designed and developed an innovative, low-cost solution to improve the packaging of the A400M ECUME airdrop system.
Objective achieved! Thanks to the high-level skills and boldness of its staff, the DGA was able to design, debug and validate a pragmatic, low-cost solution within a very tight timeframe.
The trial was carried out with the support of the French Navy, Army and Air Force.
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Naval News comments:
The Commandos Marine’s ECUME RHIBs were previously limited to C-130H aircraft for airdrop missions. This capability was demonstrated in 2021 during a large counter terrorism exercise.
