India Looks Abroad for New Jet Trainer
“In the past, whenever an indigenous product was available [through state-owned defense companies], it completely closed the gates for further efforts to seek alternatives with better operational or commercial terms,” said Subhash Bhojwani, a retired Air Force air marshal. “And if the defense services still insisted on going ahead, they were labeled as being enamored by imports.”
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The Sitara trainer has been delayed by eight years, due initially to the late delivery of Russian NPO Saturn engines and later to the slow pace of development at HAL, an Air Force official said. HAL takes advantage of being a monopoly state-owned company and takes orders promising early delivery, the official said.
HAL has screwed the pooch yet again. The decision to go from the Larzac to the Al-55I was, in hind sight, fatal. It delayed the development and at the end, got them an absolute POS of an engine. An engine with a MTBO of 300 hrs is garbage, especially for a trainer. A trainer usually flies 1000+ hrs a year due to multiple students using the same plane. Look at how many hours a handful of Pilatus trainers have racked up in the short time they were inducted. And Russia being subpar in terms of product support will only magnify the engine’s garbage availability numbers.
I remember that in the early to mid 2000s, HAL promising that the IJT will be a quick turnaround project due to their experience with the Tejas and Dhruv. Then the series of show-stopping problems started, mostly self-inflicted. It’s no wonder that the IAF has zero confidence that HAL can deliver the HTT-40 on time or budget. IAF already has a premier trainer in the Pilatus and would be loathe to take multiple steps backwards to incorporate the HTT-40 into its syllabus. I don’t blame the IAF for wanting to bypass the IJT and try to abort the HTT-40 before birth.
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