Successful start of Sea Acceptance Trials of the second Multi Mission Frigate for the Royal Moroccan Navy

The 98 meters long SIGMA class frigate, the sec­ond built by Damen Schelde Naval Ship­build­ing for the Roy­al Moroc­can Navy, left Vlissin­gen on the 18th of Novem­ber for her sea accep­tance tri­als (SAT) in the North Sea, right on sched­ule as agreed in the contract.

SIGMA class frigate Source: Damen Schelde

Dur­ing the SAT, a very inten­sive pro­gram will be car­ried out in which the plat­form as well as the sen­sor weapons and com­mu­ni­ca­tions suite are exten­sive­ly test­ed. The tests are per­formed by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the yard in close coop­er­a­tion with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the sub­con­trac­tors, the Roy­al Moroc­can navy and the Roy­al Nether­lands navy.

The first SIGMA frigate was trans­ferred to the Roy­al Moroc­can Navy on 10 Sep­tem­ber 2011.

The sec­ond frigate is sched­uled to be trans­ferred in Feb­ru­ary  2012 whilst the third frigate, also 98 meters, is still under con­struc­tion at the Damen yard in Vlissin­gen and is sched­uled for Sea Accep­tance Tri­als in May 2012.

SIGMA:

The three SIG­MA-class frigates for the Roy­al Moroc­can Navy have been designed accord­ing to Schelde Naval Shipbuilding’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary SIG­MA-approach and are a fur­ther devel­op­ment of the SIG­MA-corvettes for the Indone­sian Navy. The SIGMA approach applies mod­u­lar­i­ty in many areas.

The Moroc­can SIGMA Class frigates equipped to con­duct the tra­di­tion­al naval tasks as well as mar­itime secu­ri­ty oper­a­tions. The ves­sels are also suit­ed to sup­port human­i­tar­i­an aid operations.

DAMEN SCHELDE NAVAL SHIPBUILDING:

The Damen Ship­yards Group offers a com­plete range of naval and patrol ves­sels rang­ing from 7 to over 200 meters.

Part of this port­fo­lio are the Damen Schelde Naval Ship­build­ing (DSNS) naval com­bat­ants and aux­il­iaries, embod­ied by the SIGMA and ENFORCER series.

At present DSNS also has under con­struc­tion for the Roy­al Nether­lands Navy: four Patrol Ships and a Joint Logis­tic Sup­port Ship (JSS), the largest mil­i­tary ves­sel built by DSNS so far.