..... ma non si trattava di un missile vero e proprio .....Fonte: Ares
A Defense Technology Blog (AW&ST)
"What's This I See in the Ditch?"
Posted by Christina Mackenzie at 2/17/2010 11:22 AM CST
“What's this I see in the ditch? My, it looks like a missile,” a local worker who found a stray Mistral missile yesterday must have said to himself. Well, it was, “but the missile had no pyrotechnical charge. It could be a weighted dummy” used for flight tests the French Ministry of Defense told AFP.
The village of Sainte-Thorette is 15 kms south-west of Bourges in central France, the site of an MBDA factory where the Mistral missiles are assembled and a company test centre. The missile, 1.80m long and weighing about 20 kgs, was taken to the DGA French procurement agency's test centre in Bourges on Tuesday evening.
MBDA said it did not yet want to comment on the incident. But the mayor of Sainte-Thorette did. “How on earth can one lose such an object?” he queried. “Even if there's obviously no risk to the local population, the Ministry of Defense is going to try and trace its origins,” he said.
Whoever has lost it is not in a hurry to reclaim it ... embarrassment no doubt!
Fonte: Ares
A Defense Technology Blog (AW&ST)
Oh, well, it wasn't a missile after all
Posted by Christina Mackenzie at 2/18/2010 11:00 AM CST
The object found in a ditch near Bourges (see Ares post on Feb. 17) is not a Mistral missile but a narrow, khaki-coloured metal tub with a cone at one end. “This is not a missile,” said French defense ministry spokesman Laurent Tesseire during his weekly briefing. “We would of course have been worried if there had been a Mistral missile on the side of the road. But this is not the case.” He added that the object is in fact “a piece of industrial tooling from the early 80s which belongs to the company which made Mistral missiles” at the time, that is Matra. “It is a calibrating tool with no explosives, no electronics and no classified elements on it,” Tesseire explained.
MBDA, the European missile manufacturer which absorbed Matra and now manufactures the Mistral missiles, later issued a statement giving a few more details. Rather than calling it a tool, the company described the object as a weight and balance model which was used before 1986 by Matra and its sub-contractors to exchange technical data such as size, weight, interface etc. The object "is the model of an early definition of the missile which has subsequently never been produced in this definition," MBDA told me.
MBDA says an investigation is underway to find out who last owned this object and why it ended up in a field.
Sources close to the investigation told me that prior to 1986 such models were not kept tracked of so someone may very well have taken it as a souvenir. The theory is that this person recently died and when his heirs came across the missile model they had no idea what do do with it so just dumped it. Well, what would you do? Go to the police and say "I've just found a missile in grandpa's attic"? Imagine the can of worms that would open.
"It's clear that the object has not been in the field all these years," the sources told me.
Da "Reuters France" .....
L'engin trouvé dans le Cher n'est pas un missile, dit la Défense
jeudi 18 février 2010 14h16
PARIS (Reuters) - L'objet trouvé dans un champ des environs de Bourges (Cher) n'est pas un missile de type Mistral mais une pièce d'outillage, a déclaré le ministère français de la Défense.
L'engin, un étroit tube de métal de couleur kaki avec un cône à une extrémité, a été découvert mardi par un agent débroussailleur de la Direction départementale de l'équipement sur la commune de Sainte-Thorette.
"Ce n'est pas un missile", a assuré jeudi le porte-parole du ministère de la Défense, Laurent Teisseire. "Nous aurions été effectivement préoccupés s'il y avait un missile Mistral sur le bord d'une route. Ce n'était pas le cas", a-t-il ajouté lors de son point de presse hebdomadaire.
L'objet est en fait "un outillage industriel datant du début des années 1980 appartenant à l'industriel fabriquant les Mistral" à l'époque, c'est-à-dire Matra, a-t-il dit.
"C'est un instrument de mesure sans pyrotechnie, ni élément électronique, ni élément classifié", a expliqué Laurent Teisseire. "C'est un élément d'outillage qui servait à des calibrages de structures de fabrication de missiles".
Elizabeth Pineau, édité par Gilles Trequesser
