a huge AN-124 seems to have brought some Equipments for the Luftwaffe for the AeroIndia 2009

EADS To Aid Flight Trials of Indian LCA

BY: Army Times Publishing Company

The Indian Defence Ministry has short-listed EADS on a $20 million contract to aid in the flight trials of the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft (LCA). The deal is expected to be signed during Aero India 2009, from Feb. 11-14 at Bangalore, said a senior Defence Ministry official.

India’s Aeronautical Development Agency, which designed, developed and monitors the LCA, had sought overseas partners to carry out design-and-development work in the flight-testing stage. The consulting company would help speed the flight testing through initial operational clearance and final operational clearance.

Technical and commercial bids had been invited from EADS, Saab of Sweden, Dassault of France, Boeing and Lockheed Martin of the United States, and MiG Corp. of Russia.

LCA development areas that EADS would aid include flight envelope expansion; flight testing for high angle of attack; aero database validation; external stores carriage with emphasis on stores separation modeling and testing; wake modeling and penetration flight tests; and refinements to existing simulation models.

LCA is preparing to enter into the weapon-integration stage, and the first aircraft are expected to be inducted into the Air Force by 2010, nearly 15 years behind schedule.

The Air Force has ordered 20 LCAs valued at more than $500 million. State-owned Hindustan Aeronautics is expected to roll out eight aircraft annually. The aim of the current flight trial program is to achieve initial operational clearance with the multimode radar integrated with a weapon suite. It could take three years and about 1,500 hours of flight testing to move into final operational clearance.

Eight limited series production aircraft, along with two technical demonstrators and five prototypes, are part of the LCA’s design-and-development program.

The LCA is a single-seat, single-engine, supersonic multirole air superiority fighter jet designed for air-to-air, air-to-ground and air-to-sea combat roles.

http://www.idrw.org/2009/01/28/eads_to_aid_flight_trials_of_indian_lca.html

How can they ? They may allow European or Israeli weapon integration, but majority of our weapons are Russian.

R 77 on an F 16 is simply not going to happen. Will the Russians allow us to put AIM 120 on Sukhois ?

R 73s edge is waning fast in the WVR segment. India has expressed its interest in the ASRAAM, so I think we are going to go for those with our non-Russian ac. Americans won’t say no to integration of Israeli missiles will they ? They may not mind the Astra integration either.

On a side note : I have heard Indian built Hawks are much cheaper, It was on the news, but i cannot find any links now. Do you know this to be true ?

Thats the whole Point ,build up Stocks of American Weaponry and introduction of new and alien weaponry to IAF which very few in IAF have been exposed to ,i cannot remember one country which was or has successful maintained American and Russian Jet both in numbers ,remember 126 is still a huge number rather then 20 or 30 which some S Asian countries have

You should try http://www.idrw.org they have Archive section of more then two years and every article is easy to find there

http://www.idrw.org/2008/08/13/hawks_built_in_india_cost_less_defence_ministry.html

Every so often they wheel out a Tejas and give it a flight number and celebrate it but their never seems to be any milestone or enabling advancement that shows any real progress!

What is happening with the Tejas?

Anyone know if they have got not project management in for that project?

Speed at what Tejas Testing is going on is just pathetic and shows the inexperience our Engineers and developers have ,but it also shows the deliberate slow approach to avoid any crashes ,loss of any prototype even one or two and IAF could have lost interest and Media could have lambasted the project, MOD could have not taken time to kill it off ,ADA and HAL are taking their own time to introduce new Tejas ,it shows that it took HAL two dame years to put together LSP-1/2 ,one full year just to built and put together one Limited serial production aircraft ,and they still promise 8 LSP by 2010 and 20 Tejas by 2012 :(:(

RIP For the dead pilot ,were they doing low level flying ??

Deino, as already mentioned by coldfire2005, the intakes have been added (photos were also posted earlier in another thread). They have been test-flown on existing prototypes.

coldfire2005, the IAF had literally been “sitting” on the MCA since 2003 upto 2008, when Dr V K Aatre was the DRDO chief. Since then Dr. Saraswat has completed his term and Dr. Natarajan is nearing his term’s end. Only in 2008, did the IAF approach the DRDO to re-examine the MCA proposal.

Please understand that the armed forces are not as “upright”, straightforward etc. as portrayed in hindi movies. Massive corruption exists in weapons procurement, and it is an “open secret” that money is to be made by keeping the services ‘addicted’ to imported hardware, instead of DRDO. Arms dealer Abhishek Verma (caught in $4 bn Scorpene scam and reason why our ship-building yards were kept idle for 1.5 decades) and former Admiral Sushil Kumar who was caught in the $1.5 bn Barak missile scam are only “tips of icebergs”. The current Army chief has also come under scrutiny for some highly questionable decisions on transfers.

The armed forces of Pakistan work in perfect sync with their defence researchers on all projects like Al-Khalid and JF-17, regardless of their ‘miniscule’ engineering input — and most importantly, are proud of them. The entire Pak public and media is visibly proud of HIT and PAC Kamra, as Pak newspaper reports show (note that Pak media is very free).

In stark contrast, in India the services stay at 2 arms length from DRDO and are NEVER seen co-ordinating with DRDO, to clearly specify as to what exactly do they want. This has led to Arjun ‘saga’, and we may hope that Tejas does not follow. The way the Tejas was developed is “shameful” to say the least. For the MCA, it may be hoped that IAF goes hand-in-hand with DRDO from the drawing board to the assembly line so that it never gets a chance to complain later. And for an organization that faces criticism for not developing what services want on time, DRDO would readily oblige.

That is the exact reason why i actually donot support Development of MCA ,Too much time was already wasted by IAF and MOD had no clue about MCA Project ,ADA on it behalf had put together a small Team of Senior Scientist to work on MCA ,but without clear funding or request Whole Project is in cold storage ,What seems to be is that IAF just re-approached ADA on MCA no ASR or Proposal for funds has been made ,it will take years just for the project to even start .

Not just Massive corruption they are Clash of Egos among Generals ,Arjun Tank is a great example elements of Indian Army working on Arjun call it best Tank Army can have but others have different opinion .

Some time ago there was talks of developing Tejas into UCAV but higly modified ,if go head is given ADA can come up with help from IAI

ante_climax LSP-3 will be flying with Radar weather it is 2032 or MMR is still a mystery but we might see the first flight by march 2009