Indranil wrote:chola wrote:The C-17s are among the most well received imports we ever had. The wind tunnel offset is an extra on top of what we got. Nothing about the C-17 or M2K deals mortgaged our future like the Vikrant if MiG's statement has any real bite.
This is a case of "my bias is better than your bias".
The wind tunnel was not on top of it. It was "part of the offset". It was a way of circumventing the problem that India couldn't have had a way to produce 30% in offset so late in the game. Now, let us come to the wind tunnel itself. It is a 50 year old model which Boeing was about to pack and throw away. Instead of paying people to discard it, they got it accounted for in offsets! Great for them I say. On our side, I have not read or heard of a single run on the said wind tunnel till now. Has anybody else from the industry heard anything about it? On the other hand, I know that GTRE is setting up a couple of tunnels. ISRO has already set up theirs. So, you can infer ....
You may hand waive as much as you want but the IAF/IA/IN would not have been a meaningful force without the almost free equipment from USSR, and the PAF/PA/PN from America. And all four countries were working in their own self-interest. The equations have changed and yet all 4 countries are working in their self-interest. Any other way to paint this is bias.
When things line up, an aircraft carrier is always designed around the aircraft it is designed to carry. If you design yours to carry SH/Rafale, you would be strategically dependent on USA/France. There is no other way to paint that either.
I will graciously accept that I am biased toward western equipment.
That said, our history as the one great carrier power in Asia was built on western traditions and equipment from our origins in the RN, from Sea Hawks to Sea Harriers. They were the best in the world at carrier operations.
Now we are locked into Russian equipment for possibly the next two to three decades even with our OWN carrier when the Russians NEVER fully got their carrier operations together right. We are trading our first-rate legacy for a future of decisively inferior Russian equipment based on decisively inferior Russian carrier practices and designs.
When the IN complains about needing to ruggedize the structure of the MiG-29K and MiG saying there is nothing wrong then there is a completely different view on how carrier ops are handled between those in India (and the West) and Russia. Maybe, the Russians expect their crew to recalibrate everything on an aircraft after each landing.
In the Western sense, it is a no-brainer that a carrier aircraft should have been designed structurally to take landings! If it needs to be "ruggedized" then it is not a carrier aircraft but a landbased one.
But it seems in Russian practices, the MiG-29K and all its scarily loose fittings are expected.
Every decade that passes with Russian equipment will move us towards the shitty Russian way of running carrier ops and further away from our top-notch western legacy.