There had been reports about India’ dissatifaction of US arming Pakistan with potential weapons that can be used against India, I guess if that is taken care, the F-18 engine will gain more power without the EPE:dev2:

How many times do I have to hammer this in? The planes are so old that by all rights they should be retired, BUT THEY HAVEN’T. And won’t be for another 10 years in order to maintain squadron strength till replacements arrive.

The B-52, C-17 and C-5 have all been around for decades and undergone numerous life extension programs/rebuilds to keep them active. It’s perfectly feasible if the MiGs are going to be in service for another decade.

Witcha, if this was just about IAF alone, they would have purchased the MMRCA long before. Unfortunately that is not the case, there are many other players involved including but not limited to politicians, bureaucrats, economic situation, fighter availability, economic & technology sanctions by countries, middlemen, scandals, situation at the country of origin etc. So IAF operate in a very constrained environment. That would be the case of any department in India. But they try to get the best out of the situation.

It would be great if IAF operated F-22 and they might have desired so, but is it possible to have what you desire, always?

Good to hear the deadline is not far away.

Regarding missing targets, all GTRE have to do is to ship 1 or 2 assembled Kaveri engines to whoever is integrating it, surely? I don’t see how GTRE can slow things down. They must be capable of putting a couple of engines on a couple of trucks and giving the truck drivers a delivery address. How long does that take? A day seems enough. I’ll be generous and say a week.

:dev2:

And how much time is permissible to give them to arrive at a ‘starting point’?

The GTRE have existed for over 50 years, during which the only operational product they ever developed was an engine upgrade. I guarantee you, if this were any Western nation, Russia, China or even South Korea, this kind of performance would long ago have gotten them disbanded, or at the least heads would have rolled with public firings of management.

The fact is as a non-commercial, non-profit R & D enterprise owned and run by the Indian government with assured funding and no domestic competition, GTRE doesn’t really have any incentive to do groundbreaking research and deliver products on time. Being unionized(according to people I know who’ve visited there red-flag labour strikes are a semi-regular occurence) no one has to worry about getting fired, and all the company stands to lose from laggardness is reputation(which they hardly have in the first place).

To be fair it’s not that the ‘guys were doing nothing’. There are some very long detailed discussions on this topic in places like Bharat Rakshak. Basically GTRE’s work environment is not very conductive to getting things done.
-Like most government institutions it hires as many as 40 percent of its employees based on religion/caste quotas rather than merit.

-Under the typical government structure these employees have no performance-based incentives, not much oversight and no real consequences for underperforming or missing deadlines since it’s almost impossible to fire anyone. Combined with the assured funding and zero competition they have no need to give their best.

-Many employees are hard-working and dedicated but are unable to get things done due to shoddy management and red tape. I’ve heard multiple stories of ex-GTRE scientists who quit in disgust after failing to make any headway and are now having successful careers in Western engine firms like Honeywell. The ones who strike and protest measures like privatisation are usually the half who ended up in a secure government job because they are too mediocre to survive in a competitive environment.

-To give you an example of DRDO/GTRE mismanagement, they initially refused to seek any design assistance from HAL for the Kaveri despite the latter’s extensive experience with manufacturing various engines over the decades. They refrained from doing so even when the time came to fabricate a prototype in the 90s despite having little experience in engine manufacturing processes. The result had some infamous results, like the ‘spitting’ of turbine blades at high speeds.

I can guarantee you that if you gave the job of developing an engine to a private technology leader like L & T or Tata they’d get the job done and master the basic technology within a decade even if they started from scratch, among other reasons because they have something to gain from doing so and something to lose from not doing so.

All that you are referring to is mismanagement but you have not criticized the technical guys and the solution you propose is disband them all. So what ever they acquired you want to go waste or want to transfer them to private sector.

I get it, this is not just about GTRE but about how the PSUs and all government institutions were run in India under the socialist attitude.

But then, how many private firms have ventured into designing car engine in India, did any body restrict them from doing it? How many software firms in India are into product development and have gained a good market share for their product?

Its quite intresting to meet many a people on forums putting private industry as the sole saviors of every mistakes of public firms. Every coin has two sides. What about the high cost escalations of defense projects executed by private industry in the west. Do you know what was the intended unit cost of JSF and what it is now?

Private industry operates only on profit motive, nothing wrong about that, but the private sector in India does not have the deep pocket to go into detailed R&D as it may not always result in a successful product. If you have any doubt on it look at the number of partnership that the private industry in India has entered with foreign defense companies and most of them is not about R&D but about making products using foreign designs.

I wished you would compile a report on what GTRE did rather than what GTRE did not do? The second part is easily available in a Google search, but the first part?

I have heard news that ADA is designing two airframe’s in parallel, one for a F414 and another for a EJ200 powered Mk2LCA. From the above news it seems a third airframe design effort will have to be done in parallel for the hybrid engine. If India’s Minisrty-of-Def and/or DRDO are heading along this path I find it interesting.

Note: Snecma-Kaveri hybrid engine was supposed to be the successor to the Mk2 Engine (F414 or EJ200). However now it seems it is a third option! specially if the IAF has reluctantly agreed to it.

Is this info passed by word of mouth or from some article?

When Russians have a perfect weapon in oil and pipelines, all they need is enough weapon to secure their control over the oil and pipelines. I am sure NATO would not prefer even a skirmish in the winter.. Already the austerity measures are kicking in Europe with defense spending going to be affected. I don’t think Russia need to be worried too much. And after all they still have the big bums and the father/mother of all conventional bum.:diablo:

NATO is already tied down in the Afghan and are quite tired of it. The CIA would need to work hard to create a new evil empire out of Russia and make the western people subscribe to it. But right now it may be a bit more tougher task since the memories of weapons of mass destruction from Iraq is yet to be wiped out.:dev2:

Isro launches PSLV-C-15 with 5 satellites

“I am extremely happy to say PSLV 16 was a successful flight. All the satellites were injected precisely,” Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman K Radhakrishnan said.

Apart from its main cargo – the Cartosat-2B weighing 694 kg – the other satellites that the rocket put into orbit are the Algerian remote sensing satellite Alsat-2A (116 kg), two nano satellites (NLS 6.1 AISSAT-1 weighing 6.5 kg built by the University of Toronto, Canada and one kg NLS 6.2 TISAT built by University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland) and STUDSAT, a pico satellite weighing less than one kg, built jointly by students of seven engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.