Babcock completed upgrade of Estonian minehunter vessels.

On 31 January, Babcock announced that it had successfully completed a capability upgrade on the first of three Estonian Navy minehunter vessels at its Rosyth facilities in Fife, Scotland. This upgrade was finally completed after the Sandown-class EML Admiral Cowan minehunter vessel underwent a five month docking period at the shipyard between July and December 2018.

Docking EML Admiral Cowan, one of the Estonian Navy Sandown-class minehunters (Picture source : Babcock)

Now that it has been upgraded, the Sandown-class EML Admiral Cowan minehunter vessel will return to Estonia before undergoing trials in the North Sea in May to demonstrate its full operational capability.

As part of the contract, the capability upgrade package includes fitting the Thales Sonar 2193 hull-mounted wideband minehunting sonar (replacing the Sonar 2093 variable depth sonar), the Thales M-CUBE command-and-control system, and an upgraded navigation system on the various Sandown-class minehunters of Estonia. Still as part of the contract, Thales is also delivering a new fleet mine warfare data centre to the Estonian Navy.

The second Estonian Navy minehunter vessel, EML Sakala, arrived at the Babcock Rosyth site in December 2018 to undergo the same package of work, which will then be followed by EML Ugandi in late spring 2019.