The Armed Forces of Norway signed a contract for the purchase of Polish Piorun MANPADS from the Mesko company, which have proven themsleves well in Ukraine, including countering UAVs and cruise missiles.

As the Mesko company, which is now part of Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa, announces, Norway will be the third country after the USA and Estonia that has decided to purchase Piorun MANPADS. Ukraine received Piorun for free at the beginning of February 2022.

“The contract is the result of an open procedure in which we competed with European and American suppliers of this class of armaments. The work done over the past year by the Polish Armament Group made our bid much better than our competitors and we won the tender. Of course, we have not said our last word. This is our stop in the expansion to external markets. Our strategy for this product group is based on this. In a fairly short period of time, we have successfully adapted our offer to the specific requirements of the Norwegian customer, which proves our flexibility in both business and technology,” says Przemysław Kowalczuk, vice president of Mesko.

As Przemysław Kowalczuk adds, Mesko has a huge business potential for similar operations in the future. The agreement with Norway is not the last one that should be expected in the near future.

Back in the spring of 2022, it became known that Raytheon, the manufacturer of MANPADS FIM-92 Stinger, doesn’t have time to replenish the missile supply fast enough. On the other hand, Mesko announced in April that it was going to triple Piorun MANPADS production. The arms market is now very competitive, so some lose, some gain.

As a reminder, the Piorun (“Lightning”) MANPAD is a deep modernization of the Grom MANPAD, which during development had the name Grom-M. That is, this is already the third generation of MANPADS relative to the Soviet Igla.

Technical specifications of Piorun MANPADS
Weight of the set – 16.5 kg
Missile weight – 10.5 kg
Warhead weight – 1.82 kg
Missile length – 1596 mm
Missile diameter – 72 mm
Maximum missile speed – 660 m/s, Mach 2
Maximum target engagement speed:
collision course – 400 m/s
pursuit course – 320 m/s
Minimum/maximum target engagement range – 400-6500 m
Minimum/maximum target engagement height – 10-4000 m
Guidance system – infrared