Transcription
Well, it’s now official! NATO will be using the Saab GlobalEye platform to replace its aging fleet of Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft. The decision was announced at the alliance’s annual summit, this year taking place in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. In today’s video, we look at the order and what the Swedish platform is all about.
And so NATO has announced that the Saab GlobalEye will be the alliance’s next airborne early warning platform. The new aircraft, using Saab systems installed on the Bombardier Global business jet family, will replace the modified Boeing 707s which are designated E3As. NATO currently operates the 14 E-3A AWACS aircraft from NATO Air Base Geilenkirchen in Germany but due to their age, the fleet is expected to retire around 2035. NATO's Secretary General said that a number of allies have jointly decided to create a fleet of up to ten aircraft. And so the new platform will not replace the E-3s on an exact one-for-one basis. NATO states that the 11 Allies involved in the new Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) coalition are Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, and Sweden. Under the reported replacement plan, Geilenkirchen will eventually become the center of NATO’s GlobalEye fleet, with the alliance set to be the largest operator.
The selection of Saab GlobalEye puts an end to a fairly turbulent selection process, one that originally saw the Boeing E-7A Wedgetail filling the NATO role. Indeed, the Australian-American-developed airborne early warning and control platform, based on the Boeing 737, had been selected to replace the E-3As in November 2023, with six aircraft expected and the first planned to become operational in 2031. However, as AeroTime explains, that plan began to unravel after the US Air Force moved to cancel its own E-7A procurement in favor of space-based surveillance systems. As we reported in our own video on this channel in November 2025, NATO allies would abandon the six-aircraft Wedgetail acquisition plan, arguing that the original program had lost both its strategic and financial basis due to American withdrawal from the program earlier that year. The crazy thing about this sequence of decisions is that US lawmakers more recently moved to keep the Boeing E-7 Wedgetail program alive, with the United States’ House Appropriations Committee including $1.55 billion for the US Air Force’s E-7 program in its fiscal year 2027 defense appropriations bill. But, for NATO, what’s done is done.
As highlighted by Reuters, the NATO procurement announcement comes weeks after Canada, which has expressed a desire to reduce its dependence on U.S. defence suppliers, announced plans to buy six GlobalEye aircraft. NATO's purchase of up to 10 aircraft is, of course, larger.
Based on the Global 6000/6500 aircraft family from Bombardier, GlobalEye combines Saab’s Erieye Extended Range radar with an advanced suit of sensors and a multi-domain Command and Control (C2) system. One benefit over the 737-based wedge tail is the GlobalEye’s superior airfield performance at 6500 ft, allowing for the use of smaller airports/airfields. Fitted with a Full self-protection suite, GlobalEye at 35 000ft can detect low-level threats (as low as 200ft) at distances exceeding 458 km (247 nautical miles). For the sake of comparison, the Wedgetail’s system range is said to be 555.6 kilometers (300 nautical miles). The platform has a stated endurance of over 12 hours and most sources say max flight distance is about 11,000km, or close to 6000 nautical miles. The Wedgetail, on the other hand, has a stated range of 6,482 kilometers (3,500 nautical miles) unrefueled, unrefueled being a key word here. That’s because the larger jet has aerial refueling capabilities while the GlobalEye does NOT. Some have flagged this as a major factor but others, highlighting the smaller aircraft’s superior fuel efficiency and endurance, argue it’s not a feature that would need to be used. Additionally, with GlobalEye being a smaller aircraft, it accommodates fewer operators, with Air Force Technology stating that there’s space for 7 operator workstations, compared to the 10 mission crew consoles on the Wedgetail. Anyways, without making this a full and proper comparison video, the point is that there are some notable differences between the two platforms and this results in some tradeoffs. But what do YOU think of NATO choosing the Saab GlobalEye platform to replace its E-3 Sentrys? Let us know by leaving a comment.