National Defence committee  They will need to get the right certificate. The Hercules and the CN-235 or the C-295 have basic types of certificates, but any Hercules pilot will be able to fly any of our planes. They will get the type of certificate after training at our facilities with our simulators in Seville--or it could be somewhere else--in a question of weeks.

National Defence committee  First of all, let me underline once more that we have a unique characteristic in our engines, our avionics, and our training centre. This is something that goes to any of the 83 planes we have sold and to the hundreds we are planning to sell. The second thing is that we are part of Airbus.

National Defence committee  And of course in-service support is planned to be done with a local company, and we are having already some discussions in that regard.

National Defence committee  This document is not public; it is our response to your LOI as being ostensibly distributive. We have made a detailed analysis on the SAR requirements of the Canadian nation. We discovered that there are three different requirements. We are speaking about fixed-wing SAR as a monolithic requirement, but that is not the situation.

National Defence committee  I cannot recall the U.S. Coast Guard requirement, but we have not contracted anything like what you mentioned. I can tell you that one of our recent awards was because of our readiness to fly.

National Defence committee  If you will allow me, the CN-235 and the C-295 are the same family of planes. It's like the Dash 8, if you have seen the commercial. We started to produce the 235, if I am not wrong, in the late 1980s--I think it was 1987 or 1989. Basically, we are producing close to 20 planes per year.

National Defence committee  In the case of Chile, it is basically maritime patrol. It's a very specific maritime patrol. You could read it in the press, but I wouldn't like to disclose the type of activity they have. There you see some other planes--by the way, manufactured by us--which are the C-212, a very small plane that we also have in our inventory.

National Defence committee  And there are 83 orders.

National Defence committee  I don't mean to escape your question, but it's a difficult question, because it depends on the level of investment you are ready to make in spare parts. This is a discussion that takes place technician to technician. Allow me to underline that—

National Defence committee  We have contracted availabilities in the range of 85% to 90%, and even higher for some of our customers, to whom we are responsible for providing such availability. So that level is absolutely possible.

National Defence committee  I understand the difference. It's difficult to answer. When you speak about response time, you need to know the evidence in the details. It takes a technician to really understand what you mean by a certain figure in response time.

National Defence committee  The engines that our planes are using are Canadian; they are the same you are using in a Dash 8. And the avionics are also commercial. This allows you to have availability and readiness rates equivalent to those of a commercial plane, which are extremely high. If you allow me to act a little as a salesman, I will tell you that the stronger the demand on those parameters, the better for us.

National Defence committee  First of all, I have to apologize. All the Spaniards of my generation speak some French, but I have to answer you back in English. I hope you don't mind. I don't feel comfortable answering you in French. That's absolutely necessary. It is as if you want to look for something in your basement, you have no light, and you don't carry a torch.

National Defence committee  Yes, if you look at the countries who are operating our planes and the usage these planes are providing, you will see that our planes are landing on a daily basis on unpaved and extremely short runways from the jungles, to Finland, to the middle of Asia. By design, our planes have to operate like this.

National Defence committee  We are delivering one aircraft every two weeks. Maybe I made a mistake, but of the combined fleet of C-235 and C-295 last week I think it was 67, if I'm not wrong. But we keep delivering planes, and we got a contract last week from the Egyptian air force for three planes for cargo, not for SAR.