Iceland begins to consider private company’s bid to use ex-US military air base for war games

Ex-US air base in Iceland considered for war games

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — Iceland’s government began considering on Thursday a bid by a private military training company to base a fleet of fighter jets at an ex-U.S. air base for hired war game exercises.

Icelandic aviation authorities have been given permission to prepare initial registration for the Russian-made jets at the Keflavik air base, the outgoing Transport Minister Kristjan Moller said.

If given the go-ahead, ECA Program, a Dutch-based company specializing in providing national armed forces with realistic combat training, could build a hangar at the air base for the Sukhoi Flanker jets and rent them out for use by air forces around the world.

ECA had signed contracts worth up to 1.2 billion euros ($1.5 billion) to buy a maximum of 30 fighter planes from the Belarus military export authority, the company said on its Web site.

A spokesman for FM Service, an Icelandic company tasked to build the hangar for the jets, said ECA wants to rent the planes to NATO countries and other nations friendly to Iceland for use in aerial war games. The spokesman declined to be named because FM hasn’t yet made an official announcement.

Iceland’s coalition government had been considering the proposal for months, but there had been no breakthrough because of disagreement between the two coalition parties.

Moller said Thursday the project could create 150 to 200 jobs in southern Iceland, which had seen increasing unemployment since the American military left in 2006.

Like the rest of Iceland, the Keflavik area in the southwest has also been hard hit by the financial crisis of 2008.