Karan M wrote:Dividing hours between all the squadron aircraft would reduce the hours, but 120 hours still seems too low.
As in, 1.25 pilots per aircraft - actually higher, as right now, there are more pilots than aircraft, so take 1.5, and that translates to 270 hours per airframe, at 180 hours of flying task per year, per pilot. When a pilot is posted to staff, his overall flying hours averaged out across his career may come down, but in practical terms, the airframes are still being utilized as his earlier role at the squadron level continues with somebody else.
Consider a squadron of 20 planes, and 16 as being flight-worthy at all times, and 4 rotating through maintenance, that's 4,320 hours overall, and still 216 hours per airframe when averaged out across the 20 airframes. For a squadron of sixteen, and 12 flying, 4 in maintenance the same method translates to 202 hours, per airframe.
Yes, 120 is low. That is why I had put that at the low minimum per airframe life over 25 years. I was going by this article on the MiG-21s getting additional 1,000 life extension (or "8 to 10 years of life", which means around 100 to 125hrs/year per airframe) and applying that to LCA, since at the minimum LCA would need to fly similar number of hours/year.
Indian Air Force's MiG 21 Bison's get 1000 flying hours extension
006-08-17 Times of India reports that the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) have upgraded the life span of the Air Force's MiG 21 Bison fleet.
The upgraded MiG 21 Bison's have now an additional 1000 hours of flight, which is roughly 8-10 years of life.
These results come after NAL's successful completion of Full-Scale Fatigue Testing (FSFT) on the MiG 21 Bison Airframe C-2090. With this the IAF's Total Technical Life Enhancement (TTLE) project has come to an end.
The Air Force's Bison fleet is of 150 aircraft which originally had 2400 hours of flying as per the Russian certification, however the Air Force went for the Life Enhancement Test at NAL.
The test included flying a MiG 21 Bison that had completed its 2400 hours of flight. The test revealed no fatigue cracks in the aircraft.
So the aircraft was flown further, and cracks first started appearing at total 3400 hours of flight, which meant the life of the Bison aircraft could be extended by 1000 hours maximum.
Analysts however express fears that a one-off test is not sufficient to come to conclusions. They argue that if one airframe can take 3400 hours of flight, this won't imply that all MiG 21's can take that amount of workload.
MiG 21's have a very poor record in the Indian Air Force and security and pilot safety while flying them is a huge concern.
I spent a couple of hours searching for the exact ref. I recall reading several refs a couple of weeks ago at the height of that Prodyut Das discussion. As you probably know there is precious little about the LCA. The only actual person who explicitly says that Tejas' cranked double delta does the same job is a guy called Abhimanyu in a keypubs discussion. All the other refs only speak of measures that can be taken in delta's to avoid vortex separation at High AoA (lots of refs from my uncle Google) and all are general refs to what cranked deltas do. It is quite possible that my own reading fed my own impressions and biases and made me state categorically that the cranked double delta acts like a canard. I am unable to find a cite.
They have sculpted the intakes beautifully though 
