souravB wrote:Mk1 in its design is not very production friendly, even the ADA director has confirmed it in so many words in his last interview a month or two back(I am sure I saw the link in BRF but cannot find it atm). HAL's babu attitude doesn't help too when it was required to put in more work. The problem is mitigated in Mk2.
IMO roping in IAF wouldn't help much in production schedule but let IAF have an eye over the process and integrate the changes in efficient manner without hampering the production.
This is symtomatic of our design-development-production set up.
I think when designers at Boeing or Dassault come up with a new prototype, they are aware of what the company is capable of building and how they can build it efficiently at their company. These are design and development teams inside manufacturers. Designing something that the company can’t make efficiently is unprofitable and therefore pointless.
Do we have the same integration between ADA and HAL? There must be some but in the end they are two separate agencies. Does ADA even care about the manufacturing piece? Or like a lab project, they are more interested in getting to the specs with whatever means necessary? We know the LCA was designed with many foreign parts, many components that HAL can’t make. Production was delayed two years just waiting for the nose cone from the UK to be delivered by Cobham.