Spitfire9ok do not understand the issue here….
If your design target is 5500 Kgs and all your performance calculations are based on that weight but your aircraft actually makes it 6500kg you are over weight it does not matter if other aircraft weight the same as yours.
If the LCA structural weight increase is due to a lack of confidence in the design or stressing phase:
My guess is that the aircraft is heavier than it needed to be, however many times new ASR’s etc moved the goalposts resulting in inevitable increases in weight. Would it weigh as much if Dassault, LM, BaE etc designers had done the components? Of course it would not. They have decades and generations of fast jet design experience.
My goodness, you do go on and on …
Lets restate what Kramer said..
The LCA weight increase is due to multiple factors only two of which are unrealistic prior estimates with regards to weight estimates and second, conservatism in tolerances.
I repeat what I say above.
Not you here, Teer, but I have the impression that many posters on this forum cannot stomach anything but praise for the LCA for the simple reason that they are Indian and the LCA is Indian.
What you continue saying below shows the essential achievement of the LCA program: not that the LCA came out as being perfect but that it gave rise to a capability (many capabilities) that did not exist before the project was undertaken. In that sense I think it has been a programme of magnificent achievement, particularly in spite of all the problems that risible decision making processes, inadequate project management, excrutiating lack of accountability, gross political incompetence etc have brought to bear.
I hope India can build on its present achievement with the LCA and start to address the serious problems it has on the organisational and management level.
The other reasons are fairly straightforward, leading edge ASRs from the IAF several of which were and are unrealistic, and scope creep.
The LCA MK1 today has a HMS and HOBS missile, no other IAF aircraft has it. Contrary to your interpretation, what the article is saying is fairly obvious, that by incorporating such out of turn requests, the LCA is far more capable than originally planned in some respects, and while that has come with a weight gain, the advanced avionics and systems compensate when it comes to combat.
They incorporated it when even the Su-30 MKI has only got a HMCS integration and for FOC there is talk of a newer CCM! The LCA program is full of such change requests. Contrary to the EF and Rafale, the LCA is not being run as a commercial project with strict contractual safeguards and haggling over minutiae.
Another example is the integrated glass cockpit on the LCA, which only the much larger Su-30 MKI had, but the LCA has pretty much all the features & the overall integrated avionics suite is more advanced than on any other IAF aircraft, bar the MKI. They also include additions to the EW suite & a more capable radar set than originally planned, and a more diverse set of munitions. Again more weight in black boxes, in beefing up the structure along the way.
Obviously the weight was impacted. The other option is to drop all this kit, and achieve weight savings and for what? Stick to some definition made around 1987-88 when things were different?
Instead, they are going to stick with what they have and put a higher thrust engine for the MK2. Which makes absolute sense.
So does Kramers comparison to the Gripen. He is pointing out that the LCA’s form factor is slap bang in its class, and in fact is fairly credible.
If it was a 8T empty aircraft & gave the payload of a Gripen, then yeah, they messed up. But they did’nt. With all their tolerances, the airframe is fairly ok and if India had a track record of engine manufacture & development & could develop higher thrust variants to iteratively improve on a baseline, the LCA MK2 would have been no big deal.
You don’t seem to even understand what the LCA is. Its more than just a fighter or your favored sidetrack into composites jabs and one-liners, its about making an entire aerospace industry and that includes everything, from PLM software (yes, no kidding!) to avionics LRUs down to the HUD and even stuff like the detonating cord for the canopy!
Its India’s over arching effort to bridge the entire gap in aircraft design, manufacture and all the fillings that go into the shell, that developed over 2 decades.
Until you understand this, and stop nitpicking over what plie went over two times, you wont get what the design aims are and why they are so hard to pin down & why they kept changing as well. The IAF bears a fair share of burden in terms of scope creep, but if you were actually ever in Indian aerospace, especially the pvt industry, and saw the kind of work that has been done versus a decade back, then you’d realize the base that has been built thanks to the LCA.
Meanwhile, the IAF understands this. Which is why, thanks to the LCA, 150 aircraft have been upgraded entirely in India, and more and more LCA kit is being retrofitted to Indian warplanes. Its created an ecosystem by itself. The IAF has asked for DARE (DRDO), the LCA’s EW team to be part of the Su-30 MKI upgrade program so they can even work on the active ECM. The MiG-29s which the IAF are getting via Russian upgrade, will also now include LCA derived EW active jammers & avionics. The LCA tech., is already all over the Indian fleet. Heck, last I heard, even the Hawks were to get new Indian Mission Computers. Keep the context in mind, when you try & see what this project is, and why they have stressed on technology development, even if it was ambitious.
Spitfire9i.e. the LCA is over weight…. you would not attempt to do a weight saving exercise on a aircraft that had met its performance goals.
Makes sense for a military aircraft that is not intended for sale to other customers.
Spitfire9A Russian-drafted contract has already been submitted for India’s approval.
Full Story
Says a lot…
Spitfire9Sounds like that is sorted, doesn’t it? Tejas gets the GE engine. I think the Eurojet engine would have been the better choice for a number of reasons:
a) more TOT
b) designed for growth to ~ 24,000lb thrust or more
c) fewer political strings regarding use/export of Tejas (+ possibly MCA?)
d) thrust vectoring system already partially developed. Potentially useful for MCA?
Spitfire9Google is doing a rather passable translation of the original portuguese text.
Coments?
Regards,
Hammer
What is the source in Portuguese URL, please. Link given does not work for me.
Spitfire9This £90,000 ph cost…
My back of an envelope calculation in £ sterling for some idea, based on these assumptions:
a) production of 600 airframes
b) development cost of 18 billion
c) price per airframe from manufacturer of 50 million
d) service life of 5000 hours
comes to
16,000 ph
I don’t see how that can rise to 90,000 ph when you add on all the logistics, infrastructure, fuel, training, maintenance etc
Looking at it the other way round from the basis of 90,000 ph cost per airframe, flying 600 Eurofighters for 5000 hours would cost 600 x 5,000 x 90,000 which would equal 276 billion. I think that £276 billion is rather more than the US expects to pay for developing and flying ~2500 F-35’s for 5000+ hours.
I’d love to see how the 90,000 ph is calculated.
Spitfire9Critics of the Austrian Eurofighter purchase, for example, claimed last year that operating cost per hour of its fleet is 50% higher than the government has allotted, i.e. 3330 euros vs 2130. The government had budgeted 32 million euros for operating 15 aircraft, flying only 100 hours each.
2130 euros ph seems remarkably low. Is that just the variable increase in cost (fuel and extra maintenance) over leaving the aircraft in the hangar? IIRC Saab claim a cost (what precisely?) of $3000-$4000 ph in Swedish Air Force service to fly the Gripen.
Spitfire9Very sad news in view of one of the pilots losing his life.
Spitfire9ISRO has, is and will continue developing and building advanced rocket engines and other items at a total budget that would put any other space agency in the world to shame. Same for the people behind our missile programs. Same for LRDE, DARE, C-DAC and a dozen-off other institutions. By your logic they should have developed nothing with their budgets. But they succeeded, because an inescapable fact is that Indian labour and materials cost far less than in the West, and that we have many researchers who are capable of and have the will to stretch the buck. So arguing that GTRE needs the same funding as General Electric or Snecma isn’t going to get much sympathy from me, because all it would take is the right talent and ingenuity to do the same with less, which GTRE largely couldn’t.
Which raises a question for an outsider to Indian aerospace like me. Why has GTRE’s comparatively bad performance been tolerated rather than being addressed and fixed?
Spitfire9LM has made not to a subtle threat if you are partner country and you do not buy the number of aircraft that you planned they will cut or cancel your industrial participation despite it being based on the money you invested
That would be interesting, especially for lawyers. I think this could backfire very, very badly for LM. Who would want to deal with a bunch of jokers like LM if they could avoid it – product is tens of billions over budget, years late, going to cost much more than anticipated for customers needing delivery when anticipated (LRIP prices instead of full scale production prices because of the delays) and LM now threatens to renage on contracts, too!!!!
Spitfire9Just bringing a syntax point to the fellow French-speakers here : sensible = raisonnable in English, c’est un faux-ami. The correct English word is sensitive
Tout a fait correct.
Spitfire9why dont you look up my link here or google it, there is a partnership with a swede company, if you cant accept this, so be it
you have to join the aesa modules in a frame and put wires on them to plug into the rbe2
I think you are talking rubbish. There are 2 countries in Europe where the anglicised version of the country name starts with “Sw”. You have confused them, I think.
If you have not confused Sweden with Switzerland and are relying on some source on the internet, that source has published rubbish. Perhaps it can’t tell the difference between Sweden and Switzerland.
Spitfire9Thanks for the link to your interview. Very informative.
One of the things I found very interesting:
“CS: Será realmente que os outros dois concorrentes estão interessados em mover suas linhas de produção para cá? No caso do NG a única linha de produção final do modelo, pelo menos neste momento, será aqui no Brasil.”
the gist of which is the interviewee querying whether the 2 other competitors would be interested in moving their production lines to Brazil and continuing to say that the only NG production line would be in Brazil
I can understand SAAB being happy to move NG production to Brazil if they do end up winning the competition. But if already the production NG wing is being developed in Brazil as well as the rear fuselage and taiplane being produced there, how much industrial participation could SAAB offer to India if NG were shortlisted?
Spitfire9Sorry, that pprune thread has lost me, what happened in short?
From the pprune link to the Mail online:
It is understood that Flt Lt Saunders undertook high speed turns and other stunts that could have led to him blacking out, but the MoD have refused to confirm more details about the incident.
Spitfire9I remember that being reported. I’m not sure how much political favour you curry by saying that you can neither afford to buy new Swedish nor refurbished US aircraft but if you could afford to, you would buy from the US.
It seems to me that Romania is exactly the kind of cash-strapped customer to whom the Tejas Mk1 is suited better than any other fighter.
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