shiv wrote:Well, like the story of not measuring airframe stress and building a database for Marut and Kiran, this is yet another milestone in the shoddiness and half hearted manner aerospace development has taken place in India. Even today we lose years if not decades for not investing in all this.
To put things in prespective, initial budget for Kaveri was US$ 89 millon dollars in 1989 which is equivalent to US$ 133 million in 2005. While in 2005 US$ 350 plus US$ 65 i.e. three times the amount was assigned to Russians to give/develp for India a trailing edge engine for IJT called AL-55 which has turned out to be overweight.
Even today our budget for Kaveri is only around US$ 500million while we are ready to give Frenchies around US$ 2500 million to borrow their M88 label. Note In early eighties France spend around US$ 2Billion to develop & produce M88
We give AMCA around US$ 800-1200 million compared to US$ 6000 million for PAKFA
We give Akash missile US$ 50 million in 1983 equivalent to US$ 100million in 2005 compared to Barak-2 missile which gets around US$ 350 million in 2005.
We assign initial amount of Rs. 50 lakhs (yes, no typo) to develop engines for UAVs.
"Low Initial" funding means that basic reserach and LABS never get done and we run around with begging bowls in hand for basic assistance from others. I have no problem if we buy US$ 4 Billion needless C-17s from USA but can we not assign, say, US$ 500 million to build adequate type of labs for various engine programmes???????????
Note we will spend US$ 4 Billion on US planes rather than just building better roads, note the Chinese, no C-17s but way better military posture and infrastructure.