US, Britain sign warplane tech-transfer pact

WASHINGTON, Aug 2 (Reuters) US and British officials have signed a pact on the thorny matter of technology-sharing for the 276 billion dollars Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the costliest weapons programme yet, Pentagon officials said today.

An agreement was signed during the Farnborough Air Show outside London last month by Kenneth Krieg, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, and the British Ministry of Defense's procurement chief, Peter Spencer, said the officials.

Details of the pact were not disclosed.

Inside Defense.com, an online news service which was the first to report the signing, said sticking points in deliberations likely have been British access to radar-evading technology, software code underpinning the aircraft's operations and development of related capabilities that British firms could build and market worldwide.

''I understand that they signed it on July 18th,'' said Cheryl Irwin, a Pentagon spokeswoman. Kathy Crawford, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon's F-35 programme office, referred to the agreement as a statement of principles.

The United States is developing the F-35 in three variants with Britain, which has committed 2 billion dollars and seven others -- Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Australia, Norway, Denmark and Canada -- which have put up smaller sums.

The programme is supposed to be a model of international cooperation. But Britain's top weapons buyer, Peter Grayson, told the US Senate Armed Services Committee in March London might withdraw from it unless given access to the technology needed to maintain and upgrade the 138 F-35s it is now planning to buy.

President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said in a May 26 joint statement that they had agreed to resolve long-standing hitches to sharing sensitive technology for the radar-evading jet.

The Pentagon hopes a formal memorandum of understanding on a long-term plan for developing and sustaining the warplane will be signed by all of the co-development partners in mid-December.

Irwin, the Pentagon spokeswoman, said the partners were ''on track'' for the projected signing.

But Rhian Chilcott, head of the Washington office of CBI, an industry group of British-based companies, said much hard work remains to be done ''before we can say that a practicable and fair tech transfer deal has been struck.'' ''This is a road map of how to resolve the issues,'' she said, ''rather than agreement on the issues themselves.'' British embassy spokesmen were not immediately available to comment.

REUTERS VJ RK0040