ramana wrote:
JayS, Take for arguments sake that AS and RB reports are accurate, what would all those changes mean for the MK1A mission?
I suppose Karan or Dileep saar are better ones to answer that. As far as my understanding goes, the changes being asked should not make any impact on the airframe and hence it should not have any bearing on production go ahead. There may be an issue of consensus in IAF, HAL and ADA on who, how and when the changes should be done. Biggest change of all is the AESA radar. These changes being asked for look to me as if they can easily be applied post production. Will be a bit costly, but we cant have the cake and eat it too always.
I think the changes should be aligned to LCA Mk2, which is going to receive full HW upgrade of entire avionics suite, right down to the FCS. Either they pull some of the changes ahead of time on priority and implement in MK1A or let MK1A received the updated systems on a later date. In no situation HAL should be allowed to procure COTS systems and come up with slapdash stand-alone solution just for Mk1A when we are anyway going to have homegrown efforts (perhaps with much improved desi content) for full overhaul and upgrade of avionics for MK2, for the sake of cost and uniformity. HAL has decent experience in integrating things and we have availability from other programs too as Karan pointed out, but when our orgs like DARE are going to come up with shuddh desi solution anyway, its better to go for the later. I agree with Karan that HAL is simply likely to procure everything off the shelf and create a working contraption for time being. We will be better off with organic desi solution form ground up.
For me the bone of contention is, why production go ahead is being stopped for such changes..? And not with the changes being asked per se. I don't know why HAL Chairman would publically blame IAF for holding the go ahead for Trainers and now MK1A, if IAF if not at fault. True we do not have all the picture. May be there is much more than what meets the eye. We may never know. And that I may be hyperventilating for no goddamn reason. But it pains me to see things not going smoothly even now. What have we learned exactly in past 30yrs, I wonder.
No more on this from me. I'll wait and watch.