The first of two frigates built by South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) for the Philippines has arrived in-country on Sunday, although the COVID-19 pandemic means the new owners have yet to complete a full technical inspection of the ship and will only do so next month.
Similarly, the questions about the compatibility of the ships’ South Korean combat management systems with the most commonly-used western datalink reportedly remain unresolved, although the builders insist otherwise.
The 2,600-ton BRP Jose Rizal (FF-150) dropped anchor in Subic Bay near the Filipino capital Manila on Saturday (May 23) after a five-day voyage from Ulsan, South Korea, marking the first time the Southeast Asian nation has received a new-build warship, according to local newspaper the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
The ship is due to be commissioned on June 19, however the crew will need to go into quarantine and the ship itself will need to undergo final acceptance evaluation by the Technical Inspection and Acceptance Committee (TIAC), according to the Philippine Navy.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated travel restrictions meant that this could not be performed at the manufacturer as is usually the case.
Questions also remain about whether the ship’s Combat Management System (CMS) is fully compatible with the Link 16 Tactical Datalink, the system most commonly used by Western-aligned militaries.
The frigates were originally supposed to be fitted with the French Thales Tacticos CMS under partnership with South Korea’s Hanwha, although that partnership was dissolved in 2018 and the Filipino contract was amended to allow Hyundai to pick the subsystems and the Hanwha Naval Shield was then selected.
The Naval Shield was due to complete its compatibility work with the Link 16 in 2019, although the Inquirer reported that HHI had yet to produce the US Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) certification required by the TIAC to validate these tests.
HHI for its part says that the compatibility testing was concluded and the JITC certification obtained, although it could not submit the documentation to the end-user due to it being a classified document.
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