The Swedish government plans to spend "several hundreds of millions of kroner" to upgrade up to five Visby-class high-speed stealth corvettes in the Swedish Navy with vertically-launched Umkhonto local air defense missiles from South African-based Denel, local press reports say. If the deal goes through, Sweden would be the second Scandinavian country to embrace the South African weapon: Finland has ordered it to arm its new Hamina-class fast attack craft.
At the moment, the Visby-class vessels (designed to escape detection by combining a stealth design with the use of passive sensors and sneaky tactics) carry only a single BAE Systems Bofors 57-mm Mk 3 naval gun for active air defense.
Umkhonto is launched from an eight-cell vertical launching module. Each missile is infrared-guided and can intercept targets out to 6.6 naut. mi. (12 km) away. My photo shows three missiles produced by Denel: the IR-guided Umkhonto is below; the others are a radar-guided variant and the air-to-air A-Darter (top).
The missile launchers will likely be fitted during a planned refit for which all Visby-class ships are expected back in the drydock during the next couple of years. The ship pic is of the Visby-class ship HMS Nykoping (K 34) seen recently in Karlskrona Naval Base, southeastern Sweden.
--Joris Janssen Lok
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