Springfield Armory’s Echelon is a striker-fired 9mm pistol with design features that raise it above the majority of its kind, and two of its best features are a removable trigger group that sets the scene for modular customisation, and a clever optics mounting system that accepts just about any of the myriad footprints on the market.
On top of this, it’s extremely well priced and virtually bombproof, exhibiting reliability and ruggedness beyond anything that the average Aussie club shooter will ever need from it.
We’ll come back to all these points in a minute.
There’s only one Echelon model currently available in Australia, an all-black, club-legal model with 134mm barrel, 10-round magazines and a set of blocky sights with three tritium dots for clarity: two on the rear notch and one on the front post.
Inside, it is build around a stainless-steel chassis inside a polymer frame, with a machined top slide.
The trigger includes a safety blade, and its double-sear design provides a safety backup in the highly unlike case the blade fails you. Like most striker-fired pistols of this kind, there is no separate safety catch. This system is fine for range use, where you’re not walking around with ammo in the gun, but I’ll let you be the judge in other scenarios.
The cold hammer-forged barrel is fixed in the frame, not moving independently under recoil.
Outside, the Springfield get interesting in its details. The slide is brilliantly shaped and contoured, for example. The various cutouts for grip provide excellent purchase when racking it, and when you grab the rear of the slide to do so you’ll love the slight bulge built into the back end — it’s something you can really hang on to.
The grip is 31mm wide and, with the largest of its three supplied backstraps fitted, 56mm deep and 47mm at it slimmest point at the top of the stippling.
The Echelon is perfectly ambidextrous, with slide releases on both sides and a magazine release that can be pressed from either side. There are little stippled ‘gas pedals’ moulded into the frame for your off-hand’s thumb.
The small slide-release levers are directly above your shooting thumb’s knuckle and I found it dead easy to operate with a short flick of the thumb.
It all makes the Echelon a full-sized pistol that should fit most people very well and be really easy to control; I certainly found it that way.
This makes recoil a little easier to manage, more so than in other light, polymer pistols like this — though let’s face it, if you’re serious about competition in most disciplines you’ll go for something heavier with more recoil reduction features. (In the US there are competition-spec Echelon models with a slide cut for recoil compensation but they probably aren’t compatible with the longer barrels our laws dictate.)
Let’s get to the really interesting bits, starting with the very clever optics mounting system, or Variable Interface System (VIS) to give it Springfield’s acronym-friendly title.
The pistol comes with a whole lot of holes milled into its slide, hidden under the removable cover between ejection port and rear sight. It also comes with several sets of special pins and a few mounting screws.
It means you can mount any one of more than 30 red-dot/reflex sights without having to buy adapter plates or make modifications. See the compatibility list here. Springfield will sell you adapters for the footprints that don’t get the special treatment: Acro, Docter and Holosun 509T.
It gets more clever, though. The front pins for the system, which simply drop into their little holes, are carefully shaped so that as you tighten the fastening screws for the optics, the pins pivot inwards, clamping more tightly against the optic. This precludes any chance of the optic shifting on the slide, so you will never suffer a change in point of impact — not one you can blame on the sights, anyway.
The Echelon’s iron sights, by the way, are fine but basic, adjustable only by drifting them left or right, but it would be a shame to waste the opportunity Springfield gives you to solidly mount an optic so simply and — because there’s no plate — so low.
As for the Echelon’s toughness, I take my hat off to the Honest Outlaw for his torture test of the thing. It’s both thorough and hilarious, and I cannot rise to match it — mostly because we Aussies are never going to face anything like those conditions at the range, where we’re generally limited to using our pistols. Those few of us with a primarily production permit might want to check it out, though, along with anyone who likes to see guns survive all kinds of abuse.
The modularity and customising that the separate trigger group create are also a bit moot Down Under, but that’s mainly because there’s not much is the way of aftermarket gear available here at this stage. This could change, but I suspect demand will dictate whether it happens.
As for shooting the Echelon, it is enjoyable, manageable and utterly reliable, with not one stoppage in the 1200 rounds I’ve so far fired.
The two-stage trigger is superior to most striker-fired pistols, letting off at around 2.1kg with only short 3mm or so of creep before a soft release; in other words, crisper than most and a good weight for all-round competition.
The Echelon is competitive in accuracy and speed against other striker-fired pistols, with my personal scores (though I am no competition winner) ranking slightly above my own average with this sort of pistol. And it’s easy to be fairly consistent with it, which says a lot.
Afterwards, takedown for cleaning is a cinch: lock back the slide, drop the magazine, rotate the takedown lever and release the slide all the way off. Takes seconds. To go further, fiddle around until you get the takedown lever out of the frame, and then with a deft combination of movement — hold down the trigger blade, lift the slide-release levers and shove the trigger group forward in the frame — you can remove the trigger assembly. The barrel drops from the slide as soon as you flick out the guide rod.
Reassembly is just as simple but, again, there’s minor fiddliness to learn about how the takedown lever goes back in.
The thing I haven’t said yet is that Springfield farms out the making of the Echelon to HS Produkt in Croatia, the company that has made all of the American company’s striker-fired handguns. This one represents the third generation, and it shows in terms of the refinement and effectiveness of the design. You cannot knock HS Produkt’s quality, either.
As for value, it’s hard to pin down exactly how it sits because so many shops have different discounts on their ranges, but if you ignore discounts and look at the $1700 standard price, the Springfield sits about on par for a good polymer-framed model, and those that are more than a bit cheaper are generally not of the same quality or have fewer features and a simpler design. Factor in the money you might save in optical adapter plates and you may find the value equation tips nicely in the Echelon’s favour.
The value worked for me. I bought the Echelon, motivated initially by the need for an optic-ready pistol I could use as a testbed for red dots and reflex sights but convinced in the end by its quality, ergonomics and functionality. It has a lot going for it.
SPECIFICATIONS
- Manufacturer: Springfield Armoury/HS Produkt, Croatia
- Type: Striker-fired semi-automatic
- Calibre: 9×19
- Frame: Polymer
- Slide: Machined
- Barrel: 134mm, 1:10 twist, cold hammer-forged, threaded
- Finish: Black Melonite
- Sights: Three-dot tritium; optic-ready Variable Interface System
- Magazines: 2 x 10-round
- Dimensions (LWH): 230 x 31 x 140mm
- Weight: 735g
- Price: Typically $1500-$1700 (2025)
- Distributor: NIOA
Thanks to Mudgee Firearms, my beaut local gunshop, for help with the transfers and other logistics of this test. If they don’t happen to have an Echelon in stock, they’ll order one in for you.
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