LCA News and Discussions

[Kakarat]

2. Why hasnt LSP-7 flown after its second flight

May be it has gone to the beauty parlor to get some make-up

Just wondering what kind of EW Upgraded PV-1 is getting & when will it start flying

[srai]

Air Marshal Rajkumar responds to the post The Tejas Arrives

Philip Rajkumar on May 1, 2012 at 6:01 am said:
philip rajkumar
I worked in the LCA project for nine years from 17 Sep 1994 to 31 Aug 2003 (actually 17 days short of nine years!). I was deputed to ADA by the IAF to oversee the flight test programme of the Technology Demonstration phase of the project. Having been on both sides of the fence i have a few points to make.

1. Development of a capable aeronautical industry is a small step by small step evolutionary process.Infrastructure and skill sets of the work force have to be built up over decades with considerable effort. All this requires investment of money and managerial resources. Mainly due to financial constraints and lack of vision in the IAF, HAL and the GOI we allowed capabilities built up during the Marut and Kiran programmes to atrophy. While the world leapt ahead with several technological innovations like fly by wire,digital avionics and use of composites for structures HAL did not run a single research programme because it was not the practice to do research unless it was linked to a specicific project.

2.The LCA project is where it is today thanks to one man-Dr VS Arunachalam who as the SA to RM in 1985 had the gumption and clout to go to the GOI and convince them that India could build a fourth generation fighter. It was a leap of faith no doubt.

3. HAL feels wronged about being asked to play second fiddle to ADA. This pique continues to hurt the project even today.

4. Without help from Dassault of France,BAE Systems UK, Lockheed Martin of the USA and Alenia of Italy we would not have succeeded in developing the fly by wire flight control system,glass cockpit,and composite structures for the two TD aircraft.

5. So far the flight safety record of the programme has been good. I pray every day that it remains that way. The loss of an aircraft early in the programme would have surely lead to its closure.

6.All pilots who have flown the aircraft say its handling qualities are very good. It means it is easy to fly and perform the mission.

7.It needs to be put into IAF sevice as soon as possible to gain more experience to iron out bugs which are sure to show up during operational use.

8.Programme management could have been better. IAF is to blame for washing its hands off the project for 20 years from 1986-2006. A management team was put in place at ADA in 2007.

9.Dr Kota Harinarayana and all those who have worked and continue to work have done so with great sincerity and dedication.

10.Indian aeronautics has benefitted immensely from the programme. It is a topic for separate research.

11. It was a rare privilege for me to have been given an opportunity to contribute to the programme by setting up the National Flight Test Centre and putting place a methodology of work which has ensured safety so far.

12. According to me the project can be called a complete success only when the aircraft sees squadron service for a couple of decades. We will have to wait but it is progressing on the right lines and we as a nation have nothing to be ashamed of.

[SKrishna]

Noob Question....

I always wonder why there are no pics of Tejas or for that matter any IAF a/c which shows vapor forming over wings / lerx etc like so many such pic of khan a/c, russian a/c.... and iirc even a bundar pic.. Is it some thing to do with our dry atmospheric conditions????

For eg .... F-35 with after burner

[neerajb]

Air Marshal Rajkumar responds to the post The Tejas Arrives

Don't know who this TKS dude is, but yeah, whatever, he seems to be the classic stereotype of an IAF/Army type who while good in what they do, simply don't have the background, training, temper ,skills and most importantly institutional backing in terms of rewards to actually develop something new.

Vina you should actually read through this before indulging in mud slinging.

Cheers....

[shiv]

TKS dude and BRFite Abhibhushan are one and the same.

[Kanson]

Ok... who is this good looking young lady in red saree having such naughtier look & who is she looking at & what was happening at the other end & why the camera person is focusing on some old man with gloomy apron ?

Kansongaru. I too the photo at Aero India 2011. The lady is making eyes at the person whom Mao is talking to - Adm Arun Prakash - former CNS and the man who busted up the right stuff at the wrong place - that is the man destroyed up Chuck Yeager that Paki lover's aircraft in an air raid in the 1971 was.

OMG! I never thought that it will be you Shiv saaru. A lively picture, I must say. Glad you didn't put two oldies(though AP looks like a Bollywood hero at younger age) in the frame and I know you are a smart person.

The lady in the picture is wearing HAL dog tag, I suppose. I'm sure she must be a known figure.

[Kakkaji]

Air Marshal Rajkumar responds to the post The Tejas Arrives

Don't know who this TKS dude is, but yeah, whatever, he seems to be the classic stereotype of an IAF/Army type who while good in what they do, simply don't have the background, training, temper ,skills and most importantly institutional backing in terms of rewards to actually develop something new.

Old fuddy duddies blowing their foghorns doesn't change the fact.

Vina ji:

TKS saab is no fuddy duddy bara saab. He conceived and led the Jaguar Darin upgrade project. He played a big role in indigenization efforts, often at odds with his seniors, at big risks to his career.

Please read through his blogs to learn about his contribution to the IAF.

[vina]

Vina you should actually read through this before indulging in mud slinging.
Cheers....

Vina ji:
TKS saab is no fuddy duddy bara saab. He conceived and led the Jaguar Darin upgrade project. He played a big role in indigenization efforts, often at odds with his seniors, at big risks to his career.

Ok. I did read about his contributions to the Darin upgrade and his achievement is impressive, though the only niggle I have is in his assertion that the the Jaguar Darin is the first platform in the world to have the MilStd 1553 bus. I am not sure of that. The F-16 entered service before the Darin upgrade timeline and that had the 1553 bus. Maybe he meant 1553B , which per wiki got defined (and is a refinement of the the 1553A) around '78 or so, in which case he could well be right about the Darin -Jaguar being the first with 1553B if that is indeed the case .

That still doesn't take away anything at all from what I wrote earlier and I am neither slinging mud, nor playing down in anyway TKS and others accomplishments or contributions.

There is a world of difference between saying, there is a need to do an integration of systems from multiple vendors and using a defined bus standard to do it in response to a specific problem like the deficiency in the Jaguar and the systematic building of such competencies methodically as part of an overall strategy!

Ok, let me flesh out what I am saying. The emerging technologies in the 70s and early 80s were crystal clear. FBW controls,digital avionics , glass cockpit, composite structures, new gen engines (F100) and finally new maintenance concepts (LRU,on condition etc).

The problem is that there was no vision or even interest at a fundamental strategic level at the IAF & HAL in terms of competency building! They couldn't care less. The focus was on importing designs and doing screw driver assembly and passing it off as "indigenous".

It could have been pretty easy to have an R&D project with say the Ajeet (which the HAL knew inside out) to have FBW controls, a composite wing and experimental avionics and you could have built that capability in the period 1975 to 1985! The Brits built their FBW competency by having a hold your breath, a JAGUAR (yes, the very same aircraft we are talking about) tweaked for relaxed stability with FBW. The French did the same with a Mirage III.. Yup the same kind used in the Arab-Isreali conflicts in the 60s!

Okay, the IAF had the Mig-21 since 69 or so. What have the done with it? The Chinese played with it intensely and have multiple versions including different wingforms and even one of their latest AJT is a Mig21 derivative. Why didn't India have a FBW version of the Mig-21 with side intakes and a good radar in the nose and a MIL-1533B bus flying in the 80s? After all, the likes of Prof Prodyut Das (he posted in response in his blog) claim the best substitute for a Mig-21 is another Mig-21 or something to that effect if I remember correctly. It would have been silly to do that in the late 80s, but eminently sensible in the 70s! So what stopped the IAF from doing it rather than continue producing some tired old incremental upgrades of Mig-21s until mid 80s .. Where is the Indian version of an FBW Jaguar ? You did help fix a big flaw in it at the HAL during the production run, you did the Darin upgrade which the others adopted.Why not the FBW ? That is because there was no "operational need" and as an organization you couldn't think ahead strategically.

IF that had been done , you could have entered the LCA project with a solid industrial and technical base to do it and you wouldn't have seen the kind of slippages we had.

In the absence that and because of the lost decades of the 60s , 70s and early 80s, we had to start from scratch. The LCA is really some 4/5 projects rolled into one ..FBW, Composites, Avionics, Radar, Engine and maybe Electronic Warfare. Each of which in normal circumstances would have been researched, developed, proven and tested separately! Each of those is a separate 5 to 10 year project at least. The FBW, composites,mission avionics, and electronic warfare are successes , while the Radar and Engine are partially successful (HAL should never have been given the radar responsibility) and GTRE against all odds for a project as complex as the airframe itself has a working engine! All in all quite good.

I really have little patience with the service folks who sat on their backsides in the period 60s to 80s and for whatever reasons dropped the ball, to come back and dump on the LCA and other projects (like Arjun) for slipping timelines and "bad project management" and this and that and claim these are "R&D" projects and are not "operationally oriented" . Of course, there will be a big R&D phase because YOU dropped the ball there because you couldn't think strategically as an organization, and when it came to even "operational oriented" stuff of making it into a fighter out of a prototype, dropped the ball again by totally neglecting it and going comatose!

And no it is not just the LCA alone . Think of all the whining about the lack of an AJT and the how many decades (was it 25 years ?) and pilots lost before we got the Hawk! Well, we did have the "earlier Hawk" called the "Folland Gnat" in service for donkey's years. That was originally designed and used as a trainer! What stopped the IAF from asking HAL to not close the Ajeet assembly line, enhance whatever was needed to bring it upto scratch as a modern day trainer and maybe if it made sense at all, even put the Adour from the Jaguar into an enhanced version and presto, you would have had an "Indian Hawk" . Nope.. It was all about.. Oh, the Govt /Babus aren't giving us money to buy an AJT and you waited 3 decades for it to finally come through!

The less said about the HPT-32 and the HTT-40 fiascoes the better! There we are in the market again, trying to buy a turbo prop trainer in 2012! The IAF and the Army lost the ability to think beyond importing platforms and screw driver assembly and marginal tinkering.

For all the alphabet soup of acronyms of the folks in Army and Air Force who are supposed to look ahead and do planning and requirements and that sort of thing, the performance has been simply breathtakingly pathetic. The only thing they seem to have done in most part is to be reactive in saying.. Oh. Adversary govt platform X, we need to buy platform Y to counter it .

The Navy was the exception. No wonder the Navy today has a home built Nuke Submarine, while the Airforce is importing an ab-initio trainer and the Army is importing Tatra Trucks (and cant even put the steering column in the correct place for our roads), while ironically we have a very strong domestic truck industry that is pretty competitive with anything anywhere! There is a point in that, I am sure.

[koti]

The Navy was the exception. No wonder the Navy today has a home built Nuke Submarine, while the Airforce is importing an ab-initio trainer and the Army is importing Tatra Trucks (and cant even put the steering column in the correct place for our roads), while ironically we have a very strong domestic truck industry that is pretty competitive with anything anywhere! There is a point in that, I am sure.

+1

[Dileep]

We have a malluspeak slang 'polichch aTukki' (പൊളിച്ച് അടുക്കി). Which can be roughly translated to "dismantled and stacked up".

It is a pleasure to read when you do that, vina.

[vina]

In fact, some the absolute lack of any strategic thinking on the part of the IAF is simply breath taking. I thought that only the HPT-32 /HTT-40 fiasco was due to the IAF , but didn't know this..

From wikipidea about HAL Ajeet

A HAL project for a trainer based on the Ajeet was begun, leading to the initial flight of a prototype in 1982. Unfortunately this aircraft was lost in a crash later that year. A second prototype flew the following year, followed by a third. But a lack of government interest and the imminent phaseout of the aircraft meant no more examples were produced. The two surviving aircraft were sent to the only unit in the IAF operating the Ajeet, No.2 Squadron. The aircraft served with the Squadron until the phaseout of the Ajeet in 1991

Massive dropped balls like these are the reasons and pathetic lack of strategic planning are the reasons why we are in the state we in and importing the BAE Hawk and are going to license produce and support it for another 30/40 years.

[Singha]

dont forget the Pilatus trainer deal. a country which orbits a satellite around the moon not making as basic turboprop trainer (even with imported engine) is a bit odd.

[member_20292]

^^^

If the aircraft can be supplied cheaply to us, but be made in Jhumrtaliyya.....why is it so bad?

Colour of cat as long as it catches the mice, what?

[suryag]

Flight test update
LCA-Tejas has completed 1841 Test Flights successfully. (02-May-2012).
(TD1-233,TD2-305,PV1-242,PV2-222,PV3-340,LSP1-74,LSP2-207,PV5-36,LSP3-49,LSP4-50,LSP5-80,LSP7-2,NP1-1)

from

LCA-Tejas has completed 1840 Test Flights successfully. (30-April-2012).
(TD1-233,TD2-305,PV1-242,PV2-222,PV3-340,LSP1-74,LSP2-207,PV5-36,LSP3-49,LSP4-49,LSP5-80,LSP7-2,NP1-1)

[nrshah]

^^^

If the aircraft can be supplied cheaply to us, but be made in Jhumrtaliyya.....why is it so bad?

Colour of cat as long as it catches the mice, what?

It is not Cat and Mouse game we are looking into. We dont have MIC equivalent to US/French/Russies etc... Nor is our technological and R & D base anywhere near to them. Although Tejas has enriched our knowledge base, still we have a long way to go. All such small projects though ignored, also provides lot of data and expertise. It is prudent that we exercise vision for a longer term and decides on the time about development to avoid imports later. Had we been in their state, i wud have agreed to your point of outsourcing the less critical things, but the state of ours, I believe it is criminal on the part of IAF/MOD and GOI to have left such oppurtunity pass away.

Just think one such small stage 1 trainer could have made one addtional Pvt Sector company getting into aeronautical business. I am ignoring HAL as it is more stressed into complex job and could play a mentor role to such Pvt company. Think of the benefits it would have reaped. Such additional unit might have become the developer of Worlds first 8th Gen Aircraft going ahead or if not so critical, atleast it would have reduced the work load of HAL or doubled the production capacity to country to ensure IAF gets aircraft faster.

[member_20292]

^^^

a. But wasn't the above, the same logic applied to keeping our economy shut till 1991 . Indigenous over foreign. Swadeshi !

b. Having the IAF make rational decisions in favour of foreign purchases is totally okay (note; i said RATIONAL).

Because more than often than not, what happens is, that the indigenous entity is ONLY forced to up its game and match the worlds best, on having to compete with the worlds best.

DRDO / HAL have had to compete with BAE (Jaguar), Mirage and MiG for the attention of the IAF.

Because of that fact, even though it has not been combat and training tested, I am very sure that the LCA is something that can beat the pants off of most other fighters flying today, once it is technologically integrated and combat ready.

And look at what China has, in comparison. Since they are strategically isolated, they don't train with the French or the Americans or whoever else like we do. They do not have the technology that we have access to, nor the thinking and training that we have access to. They operate in a bubble and use their drones to mine information and hack into western companies servers.

China has an awesome indigenous defence industry with nothing technologically of note to export, and technically not up to the mark. Their fighters are not considered to be the best in business, their fighting force does not get the rave reviews given to the IAF, that Col Terry Fornoff admitted to on the web. Pakistan approaches France for electronics to plug into their JF 17s. Why? China has fabs galore and a very strong electronics base. Why can't they get their avionics upto scratch?


Hence;

1. Insistence on indigenous production has to be tempered with the need to get the best technology, globally in defence.

No one can use tribal style bows and arrows, totally indigenously manufactured against Mausers made in Germany. All the past wars that people have fought and lost or won, have shown the very large dependence on technology that this field of defence requires. Be it the Zulu's getting massacred, or the British gunning down Indians, or Babar using cannons against the slave dynasty.

The sector of DEFENCE REQUIRES the BEST TECHNOLOGY. No compromises. We can eat simple bread and not French Baguette, but to fight, we need the best rifles and the best grenades and the like. Technology (and training, which is helped by being friends with well trained armies) is critical here.

2. If Indian people on this board, can work for projects in America, for American defense companies and get American defense money for their research (DOD), so too can Indian companies and the Indian govt. fund and buy foreign products, and give contracts to foreigners. Nothing bad or wrong about it. Why should India hold a closed attitude towards foreign contracts, just because they are foreign?

We can't be rednecks and disallow outsiders, nor look at foreign technology with a negative viewpoint. We need whatever we need to be the best in business.

Let Pawan Hans or whoever start to make basic trainers, and then we'll give them our tax money and buy their propeller planes. Let private players show initiative.

3. The only fault that I can see, is that we do not have programs like the DOD and DOE small business innovation research and small business technology transfer [SBIR, STTR] that America has. Every small contractor goes through a phase of not having cash flow, and it leads to the "Valley of Death" that startup incubators warn against. There is no governmental support for this sort of grass roots entrepreneurship in India, nor for this sort of innovation.

[Virupaksha]

mahadevbhu,

a) (OT:Nope in my view. We never implemented a swadeshi policy, but had swadeshi rhetoric. It was sold as such, but it never one. Also my interpretation is India's problem was license raj not import restrictions. That both of them were lifted at the same time for political reasons & so confusion exists, but that is a debate for another day.)

You are looking at the wider economy and trying to interpret its problems for the defence sector. Defence sector for imports was never closed. (There goes the swadeshi rhetoric bubble) when did we stop importing? most of our planes, submarines, ships were built outside. Jaguars in Britain(except for Darin upgrade), mkis half outside, mirages outside, few of mig21s outside - but again many of them were SKDs. License raj however exists for defence sector even today.

Going for best means perpetual imports. When indica was first made by Tata, there were a LOT of issues and was no where near "acceptable quality". You will have Mark-I, Mark-II and so on. But without going through them, we will never build a reasonable industry.
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... f=3&t=6382

[Cybaru]

Nice post vina! A lot of changes need to happen. IA/IAF top brass need to step up and show leadership in fostering local programs. There needs to be continuity in their efforts. It can't be left to the chief of the day to decide what happens when he shows up. These processes need institutionalizing. This blame game of HAL/DRDO didn't deliver needs to end. Everyone needs to be stake holders and they need to be proactive in defining what they want 20 years down the road. Sure some changes can happen to requirements, but it can't be so off the mark that we have to start inventing the wheel when the time to accept them shows up.

More people need to be part of the science program like the navy does. More officers need to be sent to back to school to do a masters or phd programs and should be encouraged come up new ideas after spending a good 4-5 years on field. Have a mandatory 3 year posting for each person in a local project. A community of growth and ideas and willingness to back these ideas up needs to be set up.

[srai]

Vina you should actually read through this before indulging in mud slinging.
Cheers....

...

There is a world of difference between saying, there is a need to do an integration of systems from multiple vendors and using a defined bus standard to do it in response to a specific problem like the deficiency in the Jaguar and the systematic building of such competencies methodically as part of an overall strategy!

Ok, let me flesh out what I am saying. The emerging technologies in the 70s and early 80s were crystal clear. FBW controls,digital avionics , glass cockpit, composite structures, new gen engines (F100) and finally new maintenance concepts (LRU,on condition etc).

The problem is that there was no vision or even interest at a fundamental strategic level at the IAF & HAL in terms of competency building! They couldn't care less. The focus was on importing designs and doing screw driver assembly and passing it off as "indigenous".

It could have been pretty easy to have an R&D project with say the Ajeet (which the HAL knew inside out) to have FBW controls, a composite wing and experimental avionics and you could have built that capability in the period 1975 to 1985! The Brits built their FBW competency by having a hold your breath, a JAGUAR (yes, the very same aircraft we are talking about) tweaked for relaxed stability with FBW. The French did the same with a Mirage III.. Yup the same kind used in the Arab-Isreali conflicts in the 60s!

Okay, the IAF had the Mig-21 since 69 or so. What have the done with it? The Chinese played with it intensely and have multiple versions including different wingforms and even one of their latest AJT is a Mig21 derivative. Why didn't India have a FBW version of the Mig-21 with side intakes and a good radar in the nose and a MIL-1533B bus flying in the 80s? After all, the likes of Prof Prodyut Das (he posted in response in his blog) claim the best substitute for a Mig-21 is another Mig-21 or something to that effect if I remember correctly. It would have been silly to do that in the late 80s, but eminently sensible in the 70s! So what stopped the IAF from doing it rather than continue producing some tired old incremental upgrades of Mig-21s until mid 80s .. Where is the Indian version of an FBW Jaguar ? You did help fix a big flaw in it at the HAL during the production run, you did the Darin upgrade which the others adopted.Why not the FBW ? That is because there was no "operational need" and as an organization you couldn't think ahead strategically.

IF that had been done , you could have entered the LCA project with a solid industrial and technical base to do it and you wouldn't have seen the kind of slippages we had.

In the absence that and because of the lost decades of the 60s , 70s and early 80s, we had to start from scratch. The LCA is really some 4/5 projects rolled into one ..FBW, Composites, Avionics, Radar, Engine and maybe Electronic Warfare. Each of which in normal circumstances would have been researched, developed, proven and tested separately! Each of those is a separate 5 to 10 year project at least. The FBW, composites,mission avionics, and electronic warfare are successes , while the Radar and Engine are partially successful (HAL should never have been given the radar responsibility) and GTRE against all odds for a project as complex as the airframe itself has a working engine! All in all quite good.

I really have little patience with the service folks who sat on their backsides in the period 60s to 80s and for whatever reasons dropped the ball, to come back and dump on the LCA and other projects (like Arjun) for slipping timelines and "bad project management" and this and that and claim these are "R&D" projects and are not "operationally oriented" . Of course, there will be a big R&D phase because YOU dropped the ball there because you couldn't think strategically as an organization, and when it came to even "operational oriented" stuff of making it into a fighter out of a prototype, dropped the ball again by totally neglecting it and going comatose!

And no it is not just the LCA alone . Think of all the whining about the lack of an AJT and the how many decades (was it 25 years ?) and pilots lost before we got the Hawk! Well, we did have the "earlier Hawk" called the "Folland Gnat" in service for donkey's years. That was originally designed and used as a trainer! What stopped the IAF from asking HAL to not close the Ajeet assembly line, enhance whatever was needed to bring it upto scratch as a modern day trainer and maybe if it made sense at all, even put the Adour from the Jaguar into an enhanced version and presto, you would have had an "Indian Hawk" . Nope.. It was all about.. Oh, the Govt /Babus aren't giving us money to buy an AJT and you waited 3 decades for it to finally come through!

The less said about the HPT-32 and the HTT-40 fiascoes the better! There we are in the market again, trying to buy a turbo prop trainer in 2012! The IAF and the Army lost the ability to think beyond importing platforms and screw driver assembly and marginal tinkering.

For all the alphabet soup of acronyms of the folks in Army and Air Force who are supposed to look ahead and do planning and requirements and that sort of thing, the performance has been simply breathtakingly pathetic. The only thing they seem to have done in most part is to be reactive in saying.. Oh. Adversary govt platform X, we need to buy platform Y to counter it .

The Navy was the exception. No wonder the Navy today has a home built Nuke Submarine, while the Airforce is importing an ab-initio trainer and the Army is importing Tatra Trucks (and cant even put the steering column in the correct place for our roads), while ironically we have a very strong domestic truck industry that is pretty competitive with anything anywhere! There is a point in that, I am sure.

Great post!

Historically speaking, the IAF and the IA have not had a "builder" mentality. There has been a real lack of investment in indigenous capacities (50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s) which would have enabled them to have the latest technologies that were researched & developed locally.

Reminds me of a famous quote by Steve Jobs when asked whether he did market research for the iPad:

“None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

[Kartik]

Vina you should actually read through this before indulging in mud slinging.
Cheers....

Vina ji:
TKS saab is no fuddy duddy bara saab. He conceived and led the Jaguar Darin upgrade project. He played a big role in indigenization efforts, often at odds with his seniors, at big risks to his career.

Ok. I did read about his contributions to the Darin upgrade and his achievement is impressive, though the only niggle I have is in his assertion that the the Jaguar Darin is the first platform in the world to have the MilStd 1553 bus. I am not sure of that. The F-16 entered service before the Darin upgrade timeline and that had the 1553 bus. Maybe he meant 1553B , which per wiki got defined (and is a refinement of the the 1553A) around '78 or so, in which case he could well be right about the Darin -Jaguar being the first with 1553B if that is indeed the case .

That still doesn't take away anything at all from what I wrote earlier and I am neither slinging mud, nor playing down in anyway TKS and others accomplishments or contributions.

There is a world of difference between saying, there is a need to do an integration of systems from multiple vendors and using a defined bus standard to do it in response to a specific problem like the deficiency in the Jaguar and the systematic building of such competencies methodically as part of an overall strategy!

Ok, let me flesh out what I am saying. The emerging technologies in the 70s and early 80s were crystal clear. FBW controls,digital avionics , glass cockpit, composite structures, new gen engines (F100) and finally new maintenance concepts (LRU,on condition etc).

The problem is that there was no vision or even interest at a fundamental strategic level at the IAF & HAL in terms of competency building! They couldn't care less. The focus was on importing designs and doing screw driver assembly and passing it off as "indigenous".

It could have been pretty easy to have an R&D project with say the Ajeet (which the HAL knew inside out) to have FBW controls, a composite wing and experimental avionics and you could have built that capability in the period 1975 to 1985! The Brits built their FBW competency by having a hold your breath, a JAGUAR (yes, the very same aircraft we are talking about) tweaked for relaxed stability with FBW. The French did the same with a Mirage III.. Yup the same kind used in the Arab-Isreali conflicts in the 60s!

Okay, the IAF had the Mig-21 since 69 or so. What have the done with it? The Chinese played with it intensely and have multiple versions including different wingforms and even one of their latest AJT is a Mig21 derivative. Why didn't India have a FBW version of the Mig-21 with side intakes and a good radar in the nose and a MIL-1533B bus flying in the 80s? After all, the likes of Prof Prodyut Das (he posted in response in his blog) claim the best substitute for a Mig-21 is another Mig-21 or something to that effect if I remember correctly. It would have been silly to do that in the late 80s, but eminently sensible in the 70s! So what stopped the IAF from doing it rather than continue producing some tired old incremental upgrades of Mig-21s until mid 80s .. Where is the Indian version of an FBW Jaguar ? You did help fix a big flaw in it at the HAL during the production run, you did the Darin upgrade which the others adopted.Why not the FBW ? That is because there was no "operational need" and as an organization you couldn't think ahead strategically.

IF that had been done , you could have entered the LCA project with a solid industrial and technical base to do it and you wouldn't have seen the kind of slippages we had.

In the absence that and because of the lost decades of the 60s , 70s and early 80s, we had to start from scratch. The LCA is really some 4/5 projects rolled into one ..FBW, Composites, Avionics, Radar, Engine and maybe Electronic Warfare. Each of which in normal circumstances would have been researched, developed, proven and tested separately! Each of those is a separate 5 to 10 year project at least. The FBW, composites,mission avionics, and electronic warfare are successes , while the Radar and Engine are partially successful (HAL should never have been given the radar responsibility) and GTRE against all odds for a project as complex as the airframe itself has a working engine! All in all quite good.

I really have little patience with the service folks who sat on their backsides in the period 60s to 80s and for whatever reasons dropped the ball, to come back and dump on the LCA and other projects (like Arjun) for slipping timelines and "bad project management" and this and that and claim these are "R&D" projects and are not "operationally oriented" . Of course, there will be a big R&D phase because YOU dropped the ball there because you couldn't think strategically as an organization, and when it came to even "operational oriented" stuff of making it into a fighter out of a prototype, dropped the ball again by totally neglecting it and going comatose!

And no it is not just the LCA alone . Think of all the whining about the lack of an AJT and the how many decades (was it 25 years ?) and pilots lost before we got the Hawk! Well, we did have the "earlier Hawk" called the "Folland Gnat" in service for donkey's years. That was originally designed and used as a trainer! What stopped the IAF from asking HAL to not close the Ajeet assembly line, enhance whatever was needed to bring it upto scratch as a modern day trainer and maybe if it made sense at all, even put the Adour from the Jaguar into an enhanced version and presto, you would have had an "Indian Hawk" . Nope.. It was all about.. Oh, the Govt /Babus aren't giving us money to buy an AJT and you waited 3 decades for it to finally come through!

The less said about the HPT-32 and the HTT-40 fiascoes the better! There we are in the market again, trying to buy a turbo prop trainer in 2012! The IAF and the Army lost the ability to think beyond importing platforms and screw driver assembly and marginal tinkering.

For all the alphabet soup of acronyms of the folks in Army and Air Force who are supposed to look ahead and do planning and requirements and that sort of thing, the performance has been simply breathtakingly pathetic. The only thing they seem to have done in most part is to be reactive in saying.. Oh. Adversary govt platform X, we need to buy platform Y to counter it .

The Navy was the exception. No wonder the Navy today has a home built Nuke Submarine, while the Airforce is importing an ab-initio trainer and the Army is importing Tatra Trucks (and cant even put the steering column in the correct place for our roads), while ironically we have a very strong domestic truck industry that is pretty competitive with anything anywhere! There is a point in that, I am sure.

Agree totally with what you're saying here Vina saab.

[SaiK]

I think Navy should ask for budgeting now for twin engined NLCA-Mk3, with TVC, STOL and near AMCA qualities [la JSF]., as a stepping stone for AF requirement.

We could have slats and ailerons of future versions with composites/kevlar [external] as well.

[Krishnakg]

There is a world of difference between saying, there is a need to do an integration of systems from multiple vendors and using a defined bus standard to do it in response to a specific problem like the deficiency in the Jaguar and the systematic building of such competencies methodically as part of an overall strategy!

Ok, let me flesh out what I am saying. The emerging technologies in the 70s and early 80s were crystal clear. FBW controls,digital avionics , glass cockpit, composite structures, new gen engines (F100) and finally new maintenance concepts (LRU,on condition etc).

The problem is that there was no vision or even interest at a fundamental strategic level at the IAF & HAL in terms of competency building! They couldn't care less. The focus was on importing designs and doing screw driver assembly and passing it off as "indigenous".

It could have been pretty easy to have an R&D project with say the Ajeet (which the HAL knew inside out) to have FBW controls, a composite wing and experimental avionics and you could have built that capability in the period 1975 to 1985! The Brits built their FBW competency by having a hold your breath, a JAGUAR (yes, the very same aircraft we are talking about) tweaked for relaxed stability with FBW. The French did the same with a Mirage III.. Yup the same kind used in the Arab-Isreali conflicts in the 60s!

Okay, the IAF had the Mig-21 since 69 or so. What have the done with it? The Chinese played with it intensely and have multiple versions including different wingforms and even one of their latest AJT is a Mig21 derivative. Why didn't India have a FBW version of the Mig-21 with side intakes and a good radar in the nose and a MIL-1533B bus flying in the 80s? After all, the likes of Prof Prodyut Das (he posted in response in his blog) claim the best substitute for a Mig-21 is another Mig-21 or something to that effect if I remember correctly. It would have been silly to do that in the late 80s, but eminently sensible in the 70s! So what stopped the IAF from doing it rather than continue producing some tired old incremental upgrades of Mig-21s until mid 80s .. Where is the Indian version of an FBW Jaguar ? You did help fix a big flaw in it at the HAL during the production run, you did the Darin upgrade which the others adopted.Why not the FBW ? That is because there was no "operational need" and as an organization you couldn't think ahead strategically.

IF that had been done , you could have entered the LCA project with a solid industrial and technical base to do it and you wouldn't have seen the kind of slippages we had.

In the absence that and because of the lost decades of the 60s , 70s and early 80s, we had to start from scratch. The LCA is really some 4/5 projects rolled into one ..FBW, Composites, Avionics, Radar, Engine and maybe Electronic Warfare. Each of which in normal circumstances would have been researched, developed, proven and tested separately! Each of those is a separate 5 to 10 year project at least. The FBW, composites,mission avionics, and electronic warfare are successes , while the Radar and Engine are partially successful (HAL should never have been given the radar responsibility) and GTRE against all odds for a project as complex as the airframe itself has a working engine! All in all quite good.

I really have little patience with the service folks who sat on their backsides in the period 60s to 80s and for whatever reasons dropped the ball, to come back and dump on the LCA and other projects (like Arjun) for slipping timelines and "bad project management" and this and that and claim these are "R&D" projects and are not "operationally oriented" . Of course, there will be a big R&D phase because YOU dropped the ball there because you couldn't think strategically as an organization, and when it came to even "operational oriented" stuff of making it into a fighter out of a prototype, dropped the ball again by totally neglecting it and going comatose!

And no it is not just the LCA alone . Think of all the whining about the lack of an AJT and the how many decades (was it 25 years ?) and pilots lost before we got the Hawk! Well, we did have the "earlier Hawk" called the "Folland Gnat" in service for donkey's years. That was originally designed and used as a trainer! What stopped the IAF from asking HAL to not close the Ajeet assembly line, enhance whatever was needed to bring it upto scratch as a modern day trainer and maybe if it made sense at all, even put the Adour from the Jaguar into an enhanced version and presto, you would have had an "Indian Hawk" . Nope.. It was all about.. Oh, the Govt /Babus aren't giving us money to buy an AJT and you waited 3 decades for it to finally come through!

The less said about the HPT-32 and the HTT-40 fiascoes the better! There we are in the market again, trying to buy a turbo prop trainer in 2012! The IAF and the Army lost the ability to think beyond importing platforms and screw driver assembly and marginal tinkering.

For all the alphabet soup of acronyms of the folks in Army and Air Force who are supposed to look ahead and do planning and requirements and that sort of thing, the performance has been simply breathtakingly pathetic. The only thing they seem to have done in most part is to be reactive in saying.. Oh. Adversary govt platform X, we need to buy platform Y to counter it .

The Navy was the exception. No wonder the Navy today has a home built Nuke Submarine, while the Airforce is importing an ab-initio trainer and the Army is importing Tatra Trucks (and cant even put the steering column in the correct place for our roads), while ironically we have a very strong domestic truck industry that is pretty competitive with anything anywhere! There is a point in that, I am sure.

You hit it on the nail Vina. I wish there was a like button here.. a well thought out, sharply composed and presented post !

[negi]

Well to be honest there is not as big a difference amongst the services when it comes to procurement of indigenous platforms as it is made out on BRF. Judging IAF's commitment to indeginsation based on Tejas experience while comparing it to IN's ship building projects is an apples to oranges comparison. Fact is our ship building industry is an extension of IN for most of the MDL, GSL and even GRSE honchos are ex-IN folks so basically there is this healthy lobbying going on for building ships in our own country, however at the same time this same synergy is missing when it comes to working with likes of ADA and HAL that's why last time when IN chief was critical of ADA about over promising on NLCA all of us here went postal on him.

[Cain Marko]

The problem is that there was no vision or even interest at a fundamental strategic level at the IAF & HAL in terms of competency building! They couldn't care less. The focus was on importing designs and doing screw driver assembly and passing it off as "indigenous".

Well, I take a slightly different view, the IAF iirc pushed hard for indigenization very early on esp. under AM Mukherjee. And the Marut was a result of that push. So if they had no problems with pushing and even implementing projects like the Marut, why would they have such an attitude with the Tejas? In fact, we see this in TKS's writing - they had no problems with big dreams, they just didn't want those dreams to come in the way of doing their job. Big dreams/competency building in little steps is what they wanted.

My take: the IAF (for all its goalpost shifting in later years) earlier wanted the indigenous product to be a simple, modest affair - a Bison type would have sufficed their needs. Their op needs did not require state of the art - they had that in the M2k and the Fulcrum, what was more urgent was a gap filler in large numbers that would make the 90s easier.

Instead what they got from the very outset was an overambitious program that promised the moon. No wonder they took a "hands off" stance early on, and they were proved right by numerous events and delays. had the project been more modest, I doubt they'd have problems supporting it.

The technocrats otoh, saw the LCA as a chance to catch up on lost ground via technologies such as FBW, turbofan, composites etc.

It could have been pretty easy to have an R&D project with say the Ajeet (which the HAL knew inside out) to have FBW controls, a composite wing and experimental avionics and you could have built that capability in the period 1975 to 1985! The Brits built their FBW competency by having a hold your breath, a JAGUAR (yes, the very same aircraft we are talking about) tweaked for relaxed stability with FBW. The French did the same with a Mirage III.. Yup the same kind used in the Arab-Isreali conflicts in the 60s!

Yes, but the Brits and the French owned those platforms unlike the IAF. Although I agree that more could have been done with the Ajeet (at least it seems so, have no idea if it would be technologically possible). More importantly though, why should the IAF be so concerned about FBW or composite wings if they didn't deem these as operationally critical?

Okay, the IAF had the Mig-21 since 69 or so. What have the done with it? The Chinese played with it intensely and have multiple versions including different wingforms and even one of their latest AJT is a Mig21 derivative. Why didn't India have a FBW version of the Mig-21 with side intakes and a good radar in the nose and a MIL-1533B bus flying in the 80s?

LIke I said earlier, perhaps because the IAF never felt these technologies as critical to the Mig-21? It is obvious that the Chinese have no problems in bucking Russia and reverse engineering their products, India's policy (and this is not IAF policy) has been otherwise, rather straight and narrow approach. Can't blame the IAF here. Chalo, even if we assume that the IAF was a bit myopic, it wouldn't be fair to say that it was not supportive of home grown products. Why would they have KH play with the MiG-21 in terms of LERX otherwise?

I could be wrong, the nation's R&D labs should be at the forefront at providing ideas that the services can use but it seems that they expected everything to come from customer requirements in those days. And then jumped on the LCA as a lab project more than as a product for service needs.

After all, the likes of Prof Prodyut Das (he posted in response in his blog) claim the best substitute for a Mig-21 is another Mig-21 or something to that effect if I remember correctly. It would have been silly to do that in the late 80s, but eminently sensible in the 70s

!
Why? Just because the western world had moved on to newer tech? The IAF was doing well enough without FBW, and had non FBW platforms such as the MiG-29, which competed nicely vs. sophisticated F-16s or M2ks. As a result, they might not have been so fixated on an FBW, especially for what they believed was going to be their low-end fighter.

You did help fix a big flaw in it at the HAL during the production run, you did the Darin upgrade which the others adopted.Why not the FBW ? That is because there was no "operational need" and as an organization you couldn't think ahead strategically.

That's a bit harsh Vinaji. For a developing nation like India, operational needs probly took precedence over long term technology development. What the IAF saw, and they were damned right, was the force was going to face serious fighter shortages v.soon if things were not fixed. Their first and foremost priority is national defence and operational preparedness, and considering the challenges they faced, an FBW fighter was not on their list of priorities. Hell even now (25 years later), something like the Bison does a decent job in its role, often challenging and surprising more modern birds like the solah or pandhara.

In the absence that and because of the lost decades of the 60s , 70s and early 80s, we had to start from scratch. The LCA is really some 4/5 projects rolled into one ..FBW, Composites, Avionics, Radar, Engine and maybe Electronic Warfare. Each of which in normal circumstances would have been researched, developed, proven and tested separately! Each of those is a separate 5 to 10 year project at least. The FBW, composites,mission avionics, and electronic warfare are successes , while the Radar and Engine are partially successful (HAL should never have been given the radar responsibility) and GTRE against all odds for a project as complex as the airframe itself has a working engine! All in all quite good.

Successful? In what sense? In tech achievement,yes. But in terms of providing the fighting arm something to fight with, hardly! Let us not forget, the IAF needed the LCA in the mid to late 90s, as things stand they will get it 20 years later. They knew this from the very beginning and hence wanted no part of it.

I really have little patience with the service folks who sat on their backsides in the period 60s to 80s and for whatever reasons dropped the ball, to come back and dump on the LCA and other projects (like Arjun) for slipping timelines and "bad project management" and this and that and claim these are "R&D" projects and are not "operationally oriented" . Of course, there will be a big R&D phase because YOU dropped the ball there because you couldn't think strategically as an organization, and when it came to even "operational oriented" stuff of making it into a fighter out of a prototype, dropped the ball again by totally neglecting it and going comatose!

AGain, rather harsh. They were doing well enough with the Marut and were experimenting aplenty. The unfortunate crash and death of it's lead test pilot surely hampered such experimentation but you can't blame the IAF for this lag (at least not entirely). It could be asked, WTF was the scientific community doing during the same period, sitting on its butt? At least the IAF was doing it's job - defending the nation whenever it was called upon to do so.

Having said this, the IAF's attitude towards the LCA during the 90s certainly didn't help. But the problems that they foresaw surely came to pass. What is most disappointing however, is even their attitude in more recent times - calling the Tejas a souped up "MiG-21++" was a potshot imho that was not warranted. Very representative of the battle between the technocrats and the IAF - and the latter's callous, "we'll see how far they get" attitude. Time to move on and get this bird inducted ASAP. Jo hua so hua.

And no it is not just the LCA alone . Think of all the whining about the lack of an AJT and the how many decades (was it 25 years ?) and pilots lost before we got the Hawk! Well, we did have the "earlier Hawk" called the "Folland Gnat" in service for donkey's years. That was originally designed and used as a trainer! What stopped the IAF from asking HAL to not close the Ajeet assembly line, enhance whatever was needed to bring it upto scratch as a modern day trainer and maybe if it made sense at all, even put the Adour from the Jaguar into an enhanced version and presto, you would have had an "Indian Hawk" . Nope.. It was all about.. Oh, the Govt /Babus aren't giving us money to buy an AJT and you waited 3 decades for it to finally come through!

The less said about the HPT-32 and the HTT-40 fiascoes the better! There we are in the market again, trying to buy a turbo prop trainer in 2012! The IAF and the Army lost the ability to think beyond importing platforms and screw driver assembly and marginal tinkering.

For all the alphabet soup of acronyms of the folks in Army and Air Force who are supposed to look ahead and do planning and requirements and that sort of thing, the performance has been simply breathtakingly pathetic. The only thing they seem to have done in most part is to be reactive in saying.. Oh. Adversary govt platform X, we need to buy platform Y to counter it .

The Navy was the exception. No wonder the Navy today has a home built Nuke Submarine, while the Airforce is importing an ab-initio trainer and the Army is importing Tatra Trucks (and cant even put the steering column in the correct place for our roads), while ironically we have a very strong domestic truck industry that is pretty competitive with anything anywhere! There is a point in that, I am sure.

[/quote]

Fair enough.

[Virupaksha]

Cain ji,

Your argument is in short, (in 1960-till today)we are comfortable with the imported platforms we have so we will not look beyond what we have. We will have not have new programs or new designs.

And this is the attitude when we always did not have the greatest and latest but almost always atleast 1 gen behind aircrafts all the time.

Remember even FBW started first in 1940, large scale analog use had already started in early 1970's, digital in late 1970s - but even in 1983 when the LCA program was being mooted, many in IAF did not want FBW. Even LCA was clearly a DRDO project and IAF refused to spend any money. So an aircraft which even according to DRDOs rosy projections would have come in late 1990s, IAF didnt want FBW. With that kind of approach, people ask whats wrong?

Negi ji,

Navy which was a cindrella service had heavily invested in MDL, GSL, GRSE to develop newer platforms. Where are the equivalent institutions for the non-cindrella IAF? The ADA - it was seen by IAF as a DRDO institute which should be kept at arm's length and was used for "kicking to the top" deadends. Didnt the IAF know it needed proper engine technology in 1960s, 70s? It very well knew that India lacked any such tech, but where were the efforts from IAF to kick start the DRDO engine projects. If the DRDO refused, it should have been pulled by IAF kicking and screaming and invested its own funds to starting those projects. But the reverse happened. DRDO pulled the IAF kicking and screaming into kaveri. Even at that time, IAF wanted to make sure that its development was independent so that it can handwash itself from it and see these boor DRDOs cannot anyway get an engine right, lets get it from outside.

Forget 1960s, 1970s, what now?? what is the next engine which IAF wants, what does it expect from it, what are the techs which it expects are needed for the next engine, has IAF started pinging DRDO about it. This task should have been done in 2005, this is 2012. What is IAF doing for the next generation kaveri? Remember only materials developed today can be used in a engine which starts development in 2017. Is the IAF asking these questions? Has it started pressing Mithani for such materials or not. The answer as far as I know, is no.

This tells a lot about IAF culture vs IN thing.

Ofcourse many will say it is actually IN people who mostly badmouth DRDO, but the other services dont. The reason is obvious, navy people interact a lot with DRDO guys but IAF....

there is a reason why as Vina says (bolding mine)

No wonder the Navy today has a home built Nuke Submarine, while the Airforce is importing an ab-initio trainer and the Army is importing Tatra Trucks (and cant even put the steering column in the correct place for our roads), while ironically we have a very strong domestic truck industry that is pretty competitive with anything anywhere! There is a point in that, I am sure.

[ramana]

Yes its culture thing. In the end what IAF wants to do is fly aircraft. It doesn't care where it comes from.

Its real job is to kill the enemy dead.

Its the first task of flying that gets priority and promotions up the chain.

If they understood their real job, we wouldn't be at this juncture.

In fairness to individuals in IAF they have some of the best technical education at world class insititutes. But not used.

[Suraj]

I'd like to present an issue from an economic perspective on this topic. The military-industrial complex in the west involves independent private companies working closely with the defence forces to produce arms, with procurement policymaking tailored towards channeling defence budget funds into these companies via procurement decisions.

The Soviet/Chinese system had everything under state control (or the current Russian joint stock ownership system), with the state driving procurement, and in the Chinese case, with the armed forces having significant ownership stake in the production firms: PLA-NORINCO ties for example.

In India we have a system where the production entities are state owned, but there's neither a procurement policy and associated funding, nor any ownership stake by the defence forces in the R&D or production entities. We effectively have a set of entities like the Russian/Chinese one, being asked to behave like the western ones, without the synergies in either of them.

In effect we have no functional military industrial complex. What we do have are isolated programs where there is substantial vertical coordination, such as the Arihant and Agni-V programs. As long as there is no effort to create such a MIC, I feel it is futile to point fingers at IAF or IA; IN is clearly the exception, and its own example is not sufficient for the rest of the system to fall into place. It takes top down political and bureaucratic imperative too.

[ramana]

Suraj, Thats an interesting prespective. By that token the IN is unique due to the need to maximise their equipment profile for the meager resources allocated to them. Both IA and IAF do not seem to have problems in getting funds allocated in good times.

[Cain Marko]

Your argument is in short, (in 1960-till today)we are comfortable with the imported platforms we have so we will not look beyond what we have. We will have not have new programs or new designs.

And this is the attitude when we always did not have the greatest and latest but almost always atleast 1 gen behind aircrafts all the time.

Remember even FBW started first in 1940, large scale analog use had already started in early 1970's, digital in late 1970s - but even in 1983 when the LCA program was being mooted, many in IAF did not want FBW. Even LCA was clearly a DRDO project and IAF refused to spend any money. So an aircraft which even according to DRDOs rosy projections would have come in late 1990s, IAF didnt want FBW. With that kind of approach, people ask whats wrong?

Virupaksha, no ji after Cain please.

It is not the IAF's primary job to think of latest and greatest and stay on par with evolving tech as much as DRDO's. IAF's job is to get what it needs to kill the enemy, and it is downright good at this. It knows/asks for what it needs to do its job, be it upgraded Bison types or Rafale. It's job is to understand perceived enemy strength and do what it takes to overcome it. If that means getting FBW, so be it. If not, so be it. Why should IAF run after something simply because it is cutting edge? It is not a tech driven organization. The tech is just a means to an end for it, no more. If the labs can do this, it'll be happy to support them.

While FBW research might have been taking place decades ago, iirc it was only in the late 70s that a fighter with relaxed stability + FBW entered service in the form of the F-16. And even so, this was no silver bullet. The fulcrum which was certainly more old tech, was quite effective vs. the Solah. And something as vintage as a fishbed can still cause problems for upgraded solahs, if properly upgraded. Why then would the IAF not be happy with a simpler bird for its low-end replacement, which it needed? What it got instead was the promise of a fancy fighter, and to a pragmatic, professional AF, it would appear as just that - a fancy, but hollow promise.

The tendency of the DRDO has been to overpromise and then deliver mighty late. Might work if you want to catch up in due time, but does not help an AF that needs to fight wars. Obviously the IAF cannot depend on such sources for its hardware.

IOWs, TKS was right - don't mix an R&D experiment with operational needs of the IAF - there'll be hell to pay in crunch time. Of course, this is very simplistic and numerous other factors come into play, the biggest being how cash strapped the country was in those days. IAF took what it could get, and does so even now. Almost always there is situation of desperation, be it MKI purchases or MRCA - what do you expect them to do? Wait? What happens to war preparedness then? If they could afford the luxury of better circumstances and time, they would simply wait for the LCA to bear fruit (just around the corner), manage with MKIs, souped up fulcrums and Mirages until the Pakfa and AMCA bear fruit.

Again, this does not mean that the IAF should not look at indgenous products - it's biggest mistake(s) in this whole fiasco, imho was a) It did not depute the necessary manpower to the project and stay abreast of it, thereby asking for revisions at the last moment, and b) around 2004-5 when it insisted upon ASR revisions. Should have taken what was available then, worked out the kinks, and by now we'd all be in a better position.

Like I said, while the IAF might be considered myopic and even a bit egotistical, the technocrats could similarly be considered rather impractical with little concern about customer timelines. Time for people to get past the past and move on.

[Cain Marko]

I'd like to present an issue from an economic perspective on this topic. The military-industrial complex in the west involves independent private companies working closely with the defence forces to produce arms, with procurement policymaking tailored towards channeling defence budget funds into these companies via procurement decisions.

The Soviet/Chinese system had everything under state control (or the current Russian joint stock ownership system), with the state driving procurement, and in the Chinese case, with the armed forces having significant ownership stake in the production firms: PLA-NORINCO ties for example.

In India we have a system where the production entities are state owned, but there's neither a procurement policy and associated funding, nor any ownership stake by the defence forces in the R&D or production entities. We effectively have a set of entities like the Russian/Chinese one, being asked to behave like the western ones, without the synergies in either of them.

In effect we have no functional military industrial complex. What we do have are isolated programs where there is substantial vertical coordination, such as the Arihant and Agni-V programs. As long as there is no effort to create such a MIC, I feel it is futile to point fingers at IAF or IA; IN is clearly the exception, and its own example is not sufficient for the rest of the system to fall into place. It takes top down political and bureaucratic imperative too.

Suraj, insightful point!

[Kartik]

Well to be honest there is not as big a difference amongst the services when it comes to procurement of indigenous platforms as it is made out on BRF. Judging IAF's commitment to indeginsation based on Tejas experience while comparing it to IN's ship building projects is an apples to oranges comparison. Fact is our ship building industry is an extension of IN for most of the MDL, GSL and even GRSE honchos are ex-IN folks so basically there is this healthy lobbying going on for building ships in our own country, however at the same time this same synergy is missing when it comes to working with likes of ADA and HAL that's why last time when IN chief was critical of ADA about over promising on NLCA all of us here went postal on him.

So the question that arises is who or what prevented the IAF from taking a pro-active approach and being a major stakeholder right from the beginning, involving itself deeply in the program management aspect of LCA so that they could have a big say in critical design choices? TKS’ own article gives evidence of a service wide lack of knowledge on how developmental programs should proceed. They really do seem to lack foresight and sit on their haunches till a platform ‘suddenly’ becomes dangerous (e.g.HPT-32) or obsolete (Marut, Ajeet, MiG-21). Only on the Su-30MKI are they showing some foresight, by coming up with a Super-30 upgrade while the fleet is still young.

The IAF treated this project like a step-daughter and was hardly involved in the initial stages, hoping that the program would die off as technology denial, scope creep, technical challenges and missed deadlines eventually mounted to an insurmountable level. Why did they wait till 2006 to depute a team for program management? Even AM Rajkumar mentions how his deputation to the LCA program was almost like exile and his promotion was stifled on the excuse that he was posted to Bangalore and that it was an “easy posting”.

The IN actually deputes its personnel to its ship building programs and has the skill set to design its own ships via its own design organization..where is the IAF’s own design house that assists ADA/HAL in their new aircraft programs? The biggest problem is that the IAF views itself purely as an end-user and compares the product to off-the-shelf acquisitions from abroad. It wants to skip all the effort and pain involved in designing and developing a product that really suits its own needs the best. As much as I hate to say this, the PAF has made sure that with its limited resources, by engaging itself deeply in the program management aspects of the JF-17, they have a viable fighter that they are themselves happy with- because they were involved in the equipment and design choices far more than the IAF was till a long time into the LCA project.

[Virupaksha]

Virupaksha, no ji after Cain please.

It is not the IAF's primary job to think of latest and greatest and stay on par with evolving tech as much as DRDO's.

The same no ji for me please.

Cain, with that statement I have a big big big problem with and that effectively explains the difference of our approaches.

As Ramana says, it is a culture thing and as long as that culture exists, IAF will remain a second-rate air force dependent on other air forces to develop.

[suryag]

Another example of the enterprising attitude of IN is the KMGT project. This they did when there was no light in sight for the main project deliverable. The only inexplicable thing with IN is its reluctance to have the Dhruv in its ranks

[vina]

Big dreams/competency building in little steps is what they wanted. ..


....My take: the IAF (for all its goalpost shifting in later years) earlier wanted the indigenous product to be a simple, modest affair - a Bison type would have sufficed their needs. Their op needs did not require state of the art - they had that in the M2k and the Fulcrum, what was more urgent was a gap filler in large numbers that would make the 90s easier.

Okay. Why didn't they put their money where their mouth was ? What did they do to build competency ? Which R&D project with a key competency in their mind did they fund between say 70s and 85 to maybe even today ?

Okay. Even where was the composite winged Ajeet ? Composite winged Mig-21 with side intakes, big radar in the nose and Mil 1553B bus flying in early 80s, if the IAF wanted an "operationally" oriented fighter, even if you didn't want FBW? That would have been a souped up Mig21 ++ that Tipnis et al would have been so in love with and gone on and on about it over Whiskey long after they retired. You could have done this in the late 70s. If you wanted to do that in the late 80s instead of the LCA, it would have been silly and you would have ended up with a plane like the JF-17 Bandar today. A JF-17 equivalent would have been fine for the 80s to 2000 period, but simply wont cut it today.

But see what they did,they ran to the Russians in the late eighties to do a "Bison" (largely an avionics upgrade). The Isrealis did a "Lancer" upgrade for that without even building a single Mig-21. Why couldn't you , who built a couple of hundreds ? The Chinese did some dramatic things with it. Talk is cheap of saying "I want an operational fighter" , but I see no moves to see it come about at all back in the 70s when the Mig-21 was already what 25 years old ?

The Govt babu sure as hell wont fund an R&D project from NAL/HAL/Drdo whatever of any scale without a possible application in mind. Only if the services pushed that and showed it was necessary, they could have done that. So what did the IAF do ?

More importantly though, why should the IAF be so concerned about FBW or composite wings if they didn't deem these as operationally critical?

Unless you are an absolute old fuddy-duddy reliving the days of shooting down Sabres or whatever in 65/71, without critical technologies like FBW and composites , avionics and advanced sensors, you are simply not competitive. You are toast. That is why. I am sure the smarter folks in the IAF knew that all along (after all, they did attend all the air shows and subscribe to magazines and meet the foreign manufacturers!), but still as an organization couldn't do anything.

In fact, I would submit that if ANY aircraft in the IAF's inventory would have benefited DRAMATICALLY from FBW based stability augmentation, it is the Mig-21, yes the same old beloved Mig-21! If I remember correctly, the most often whined about "faults" of the Mig-21 is that it's forward fuel tank is not useable because the plane becomes dangerously close to losing stability and how esp during landing with wing and fuselage tanks empty, it becomes hair raising. How many losses of planes and pilots lost , all put down to "pilot error" , I wonder. This also limits the range of the Mig-21 if I recall correctly. Surely the IAF knew of this from since 1969! Where was the artificial stability augmentation project for the Mig-21 since the 70s or 80s that would address a direct operational need of enhancing range and endurance, increasing maneuverability and made it much much safer to fly, even if you didn't want to call it FBW ? In fact even a small sharply focused project on that lines could have given you a brilliant platform to build a full digital FBW later. So why didn't the likes of folks who said "A more modern Mig-21 for the older one" and TKS and the others who flew them and operated them on a daily basis ask for one ?

Fact is, these things are operationally critical. IAF couldn't do it, because they were looking for the Russians to fix it for them, who were moving on to other platforms and retired the Mig-21, while you are still flogging it today. It made tremendous sense to invest in a radical Mig-21 upgrade in the 70s, if you were planning to keep it for another 20 years. A big dropped ball there due to lack of any strategic insight.

That's a bit harsh Vinaji. For a developing nation like India, operational needs probly took precedence over long term technology development. What the IAF saw, and they were damned right, was the force was going to face serious fighter shortages v.soon if things were not fixed.

Really! How do you explain the dropped balls with the HPT-32 and HTT-40. R.Varadarajan (HAL and service folks would know him) was distant family. Everyone knew the HPT-32's problems for a long long time and HAL did propose a turbo trainer way back. See the fiasco there. What about the AJT case? HAL did produce one an eminently sensible one there as well, but simply ignored /dumped. Those were operationally critical, but the IAF blew it massively there !

I repeat this once again. For all the alphabet soup of acronyms of the folks in Army and Air Force who are supposed to look ahead and do planning and requirements and that sort of thing, the performance has been simply breathtakingly pathetic.

[Virupaksha]

I'd like to present an issue from an economic perspective on this topic. The military-industrial complex in the west involves independent private companies working closely with the defence forces to produce arms, with procurement policymaking tailored towards channeling defence budget funds into these companies via procurement decisions.

The Soviet/Chinese system had everything under state control (or the current Russian joint stock ownership system), with the state driving procurement, and in the Chinese case, with the armed forces having significant ownership stake in the production firms: PLA-NORINCO ties for example.

In India we have a system where the production entities are state owned, but there's neither a procurement policy and associated funding, nor any ownership stake by the defence forces in the R&D or production entities. We effectively have a set of entities like the Russian/Chinese one, being asked to behave like the western ones, without the synergies in either of them.

In effect we have no functional military industrial complex. What we do have are isolated programs where there is substantial vertical coordination, such as the Arihant and Agni-V programs. As long as there is no effort to create such a MIC, I feel it is futile to point fingers at IAF or IA; IN is clearly the exception, and its own example is not sufficient for the rest of the system to fall into place. It takes top down political and bureaucratic imperative too.

As I had alluded in a previous post, defence in India is still license raj & thus all the ills which afflicted business still hamper it today.

However the navy has shown that even such a model can be harnessed. One swallow doesnt make a summer. What drove all these policy innovations for navy was the absolute shortage of funds. They had to think innovatively to make their small budget extend. Possibly IA and IAF need the same thing, the Deng Xiopang act - who cut the budget of PLA forcing PLA to innovate and modernize.

When IAF/IA get the message that they will not be getting the next latest and greatest aircraft (MRCA/artillery/tank), we will suddenly see the same innovation. Even after 25 years of bofors, did you see ANY push from army for a DRDO artillery? No, because if push comes to shove ala another kargil, we will get the artillery paying 10 times the cost, but will get them at the front line. and the arjun saga is well known. Cut the budget of army by 25% and I bet that the whole sahayak (one who irons, shines boots) system vanish- currently budgeted at 178 crores and instead of DRDO running around the army for the next arjun order, the army will be running behind DRDO asking them to develop a new artillery piece and so on.

PS: I do realize that this will create temporary-medium operational problems & I am not actually advocating it - but it is only a whine about that customer culture they seem to have.

[ramana]

In one way yes. During the 50s the GOI would spend more on IAF acquiring jets which were good for fly pasts. Money was no object.

[Dileep]

When I need a tv/dvd player/computer, I go to the shop to buy one, while I am quite competent to build one myself. In my childhood, we used to build the ploughs etc, because ready-made ploughs were expensive and not easily available.

Makes sense ain't it?

[Virupaksha]

When I need a tv/dvd player/computer, I go to the shop to buy one, while I am quite competent to build one myself. In my childhood, we used to build the ploughs etc, because ready-made ploughs were expensive and not easily available.

Makes sense ain't it?

What did I do to get the spy master out and running after me

[Dileep]

I actually supported your view.

I think IAF thinks the way my SHQ thinks. Her job is to cook the rice and vegetables. It is my job to 'arrange' the ready to boil rice kernels, ready to chop vegetables, and ready to add spice powder. She doesn't really care if I grow them, or buy from the store. If I grew them, she will complain about the small-ness of the brinjals, and the worm-holes on the amaranth. If I bought them from the corner shop, she will complain about them being not fresh enough. If I bought them from Reliance Super, she is happy.

IAF mindset, apparently, is that they are a professional force. Their job is to fight. It is the job of the (bloody civilian) govt to get them the stuff to fight with (and show them the enemy to fight as well).

[nelson]

The above may seem to be true unless the question of buying vegetables for lunch directly impinges on the chances of your survival after partaking it.

When it is my life and that of my men at stake, i will not wait for the DRDO to come up with a good enough product. I will ask for the best that is conceivable. If that can be made available indigenous I am all for it.