I don’t know but isn’t the IAF the customer and HAL the furnisher (pronounce the comply-er)?

The IAF does not have the luxury of merely being the customer. If that is the case, then its no different than say the PAF or the PLAAF. Its the “Indian” AF as such, they have to be involved with local industry to get their solutions made, to save precious foreign exchange (India is not exactly rolling in money to be thrown away on big ticket imports – the defence budget consumes approximately 20% of GOI expenditure, despite being pegged at an ostensibly low % of GDP) and also get solutions that work! The problem is the dysfunctional nature of the relationship between IAF & local industry, of which IAF shares a significant portion of the blame as does the Govt of India, through both its actions and those of its owned PSUs.

All those political diatribe sounds strange from where I stand. That they modified the requierment in order to get quick delivery of a plane that will be cheaper, save students live and is basic enough to be introduced without prob by the services sounds absolutly raisonable. Frankly I wish more services would hve the balls to do that.

The problem is you don’t have enough knowledge of the issue at hand, hence your inability to understand how flawed the procurement process is & how the IAF (and the Army) routinely use national security, lives at stake etc to push through procurements which are often of limited use or don’t meet the earlier standards! Basically, they break the rules in order to “save lives”, but end up procuring equipment which is not suited to their needs while using various tricks to prevent similar simpler equipment being made locally.

In this case, what was the IAF doing all these years when the HPT-32 replacement issue was pending? They showed no interest in a local replacement whatsoever. HAL has been pitching a modernized variant way back since the early 1990s. It would have saved time, given the HAL some decent experience & also segued into IAF procurement plans. Instead, the IAF literally sabotaged various attempts to make a local trainer. With some reluctance, they went for an IJT at HAL, noted it was underpowered – so HAL had to run to Russia for an AL-31 derivative. That proved to be another boondoggle, so the IAF now claims it cannot trust HAL. But if that were the case, why did they release such an ambitious PSQR to HAL to work on?

Basically, they gave such a PSQR, that it could be easily shown that HAL could not do it overnight or would require significant ab-initio work, and then released an ASQR, claiming the delay was unacceptable. And this ASQR then has 12 downwards revisions to significantly reduce the performance of the trainer.

Two of the issues that affected flight safety in the obsolete Deepak, were the limited glide ratio (hence the PSQR had an almost 40-50% hike required) and lack of today’s gen crew escape facilities (PSQR asked for zero zero escape seats). Both of these were significantly downgraded for the ASQR, under the claim of “cost”. In which case, why were such specs given to HAL to begin with?

And if these issues were serious, and I do think they are, it is the Super Tucano which should have been purchased not the PC-7.

For the accusing part of the article, let’s wait and see how will react the justice administration.

Sorry, but do you seriously think the Govt in power will let news of another scam (if there is one) or any accusation of impropriety come out?
You really need to understand the Indian system better. The Indian judiciary is overloaded, and unduly deferential often to the Govt (lest it be accused of overreach), the media is literally in the Govts pocket (google for Bharat Nirman ads and the revenues they represent), and the current political admin is angling hard for a 2014 election.

There have been umpteen scams in India and they have “managed” public opinion & political opposition (via political pressure and all sorts of arm twisting) to avoid censure so far.

This is peanuts in comparison.

The basic problem is the lack of faith in HAL to produce a trainer in time. Given how long HAL has been working on the intermediate trainer I am not surprised at the lack of faith. In the meantime the pilots flying the HPT-32 were getting killed in crashes. Something had to be done to acquire a plane so that the training of new pilots could go on and the Pilatus PC-7 serves the purpose and is used by a number of air forces in the world. As for dilution of ASQR it was probably done so that more than one plane (Embraer Super Tucano) qualified. I dont know if any corruption was involved in the dilution of the ASQR and will hold judgement till I hear otherwise.

Its not just the immediacy of the issue argument, the point is that a deliberately high PSQR was issued to HAL, which would have resulted in HAL taking a long time to develop the aircraft, that was then used to push for an OTS import, for which, conveniently, the PSQR was diluted across the board – not just in 1,2 areas, to literally favour the PC-7 (the fact that the ASR literally matches the specs of the PC-7 in some areas is note worthy). That combined with the manner in which IAF routinely attacks HAL & other DPSUs in public fora, while not acknowledging any of its own mistakes in procurement or local programs – that just reeks of high handed arrogance and the attitude, that they can get away with any “trick” to basically game the procurement per their fancy. In the past, the IAF did much the same with several other programs, and the attitude of some folks in AHQ (who advise the CAS) is particularly atrocious. (Remember advice given to a CAS to not even attend the LCA’s first flight – this sort of politicking is unacceptable and leads to dysfunctional relationships).

or it may just as well be written for lobbying purposes… for sure, Dassault has no fiscal nor financial problems at this time

Read between the lines.. its kind of clear that Dassault did not want to incur fiscal losses on account of any perceived slippage in work, which related to the difficulties in meeting a challenging schedule with extensive TOT transfer, plus offsets via their suppliers (which might mean TOT again).. hence their reluctance to work with HAL and go with the easier work with Reliance option…which TBH, was pretty much seen as Dassault attempting to do a cop out on the hard TOT phase and team up with a junior partner who would mostly assemble French manufactured kits for a token made in India label. Easier to meet schedules for sure, but would sink the original aim of having extensive local support and TOT of critical items to local industry. Reliance is nowhere near HAL in terms of ability to absorb or even assemble the Rafale at the same level of from raw materials stage (which HAL has managed with the Su-30 MKI). The MOD has stuck to its guns on having the aircraft made at HAL and also not renegotiating the terms of delivery. So apparently, its the French Govt which will now act as the guarantor of the delivery (as versus the liability being borne by Dassault alone) and the program will proceed. Seems to be a reasonable compromise. If anything, it kind of guarantees the Rafale will come to India.

Thanks!

On another note, its heartening to see India’s steady progress in EW systems. Time was that the insufficient coverage issue for RWRs as experienced by trying to fit standard designs on these different designs – Su-30, MiGs etc – would have meant we would have had to request a foreign OEM like Thales, SAAB or Elta to solve our issues. Now we have the capability to make both bespoke RWRs (each more advanced than the previous, with technology advancement going on constantly) and also integrated SPJ suites (with critical capabilities sourced locally).
The next steps would be to ramp up in terms of both high power jammers (escort jamming systems), wide/exotic band jammers (for all sorts of comms, C3I jamming) and network enabled jamming, with formations of jammers able to talk to each other as they degrade networks.

Unfortunately, we haven’t had the same level of success in airborne FCR yet. Hope these too catch up. There is now a naval surveillance radar XV2004 cleared for production, and another AESA system for the AEW&CS in trials. Hopefully, the technologies developed via the LCA MMR will be leveraged for a successful local AESA MMR & like in EW, we end up having families of radar systems, each iteratively more advanced than the previous and adopted by the customer.

As per Aeromag, the LCA and MiG-29’s internal EW suite will be test flown by this year. Does any one have any details on this EW suite’s specs?

These are basically the DARE EW suite, adapted for the LCA and MiG-29. It features a complete receive array (as in full coverage) with high accuracy direction finding capability & ability to sort through dense/overlapping signals, which is then fed to a central processing unit, which processes the information and provides it to the pilot plus also gives it to the jamming array for countermeasures. The central unit is combined with a techniques generator with DRFM. The jamming array, can be of any suitable type. For the LCA its a microwave power module based jamming system, whereas for the MiG-29, (which has a higher RCS and can also sport a heavier array), its an AESA jammer codeveloped with Italy’s Elettronica. Basically, DARE has developed a modular EW suite with better performance than its baseline RWRs, which can analyze and counter advanced radar threats, and be interfaced with suitable emitter (depending on the needs required).

yvw, these are public.

THobbes, IAF plan for the type was around 180 hrs per pilot per year, and the two seaters would pull more. The type was noted as having significant airframe life.

Halloweene, thanks.

“new cell reinforcement EW spectra like system “

What does new cell reinforcement mean?

“and RDY3 radar”

This is renamed RC400 radar, correct, which is ~80% of performance of RDY2 but significantly cheaper?

I will try to look it up if I have the time but you can believe whatever you so choose.

It would be good if you can find the time, because its very hard to believe that either a professional AF like the PAF or an USAF evaluator would make such a statement, unless the context was entirely different (see below).

You misunderstood, that is not what I said, please reread my posts.

I did read what you said & I even attempted to make sense of what you write on your blog (grandestrategy what not), but it simply does not add up. Your claim is that “Its interesting you’d say that thobbes. As strange as this may sound, the PAF is actually more concerned about the IAF M2Ks. For whatever reasons… “….

It would be one thing for the PAF to be (say) concerned about the Mirage because it is (say) tasked for nuclear strike whereas the Flankers are not. And with the Flankers coming in, the Mirages role becomes more focused on the strategic.

In which hypothetical case, the PAF may be more concerned about Mirage movement and their employment.
(In reality though, the Mirages are not single tasked – they remain fully multirole as the upgrade shows).

The point is at least this could have been a possible grounds of exploration. In contrast, you made a platform to platform comparison of the MKI and Mirage which was full of incorrect assumptions.

Nobody serious – in the IAF or otherwise – would ever believe that as things stand, the Mirage is in any significant way superior overall to the MKI. Besides which a fleet of 270 Su-30 MKIs is far more powerful than 3 squadrons (that to from just 50 airframes) of the Mirage 2000.

I found it interesting that PAF are more concerned with under 50 Mirage 2000s that are used in a multi-role fashion than272-odd Su-30MKIs coming on line!

The PAF is obviously more concerned about the Flankers, as versus the smaller fleet of older Mirage 2000s. Dont confuse the whimsical views of a poster with those of the PAF. The poster wants to believe the Mirage>Flanker, because the IAF has more Flankers than Mirages. If it were the other way around, and the PAF had no counter to the Mirages, he would be saying the Flanker> Mirage.

In terms of the combination of range/payload, sensor fit, weapons diversity plus sheer performance – and to top it all off, the numbers, the PAF has nothing to really take on the IAF Flanker fleet today. They have a few squadrons of silver bullet F-16s which will be carefully husbanded. In contrast, the IAF is already well on its way to the 10th Flanker squadron & will easily field around 270 of the type within the next few years, after which the first 80 will begin upgrades to the Super 30 standard. In roughly the same timeframe, the first LRIP FGFAs will be coming online for squadron use & other types will be inducted in parallel.

Unless the Chinese step in and start giving military equipment in huge amounts, free, the PAF will be struggling to even remain relevant, let along catch-up – which they can’t.