i dont want to drag pissing contest into this but wish to share my unbiased view. their is no dough that india has contributed more to its LCA project then Pakistan has done to its JF-17.. we have tendency to call “licensed reverse engineering” as indigenous.. india also enjoys multi national ToT from France russia and israel and have learned a lot of “know how” ability to build their own components. without the support of foreign inputs LCA would be simply dead by now!

-LCA at present is only pulling 6gs. ASR has been decreased to 8gs from 9g (For the benefit of LCA?) empty weight of LCA is 6.5 tons now.
-20 LCA will be produced by 2011 and the other 20 by 2016.
-Final Operational Clearance (FOC) expected by the year 2012-2013
-The second track should be for the re-engined Tejas Mk 2 which can be produced in the required numbers by 2020 or so. Finally, in the third track we can look at Tejas Mk 3 fitted with the Kaveri Mk 2 engine jointly developed with a foreign partner in the 2025 time frame. This aircraft should have Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar.

This is what LCA program director has to say..

-Only for the FOC, we are planning to integrate the Beyond Visual Range (BVR) missile and some more conventional weapons.
-Kaveri engine was fine for the LCA programme when it started. But as we have shifted the goal-post, which is the LCA weight, the Kaveri engine does not meet the ASR requirement. In the meantime, I am also requesting GTRE that technologies are available in the world to make the Kaveri engine fulfil the ASR requirements.
We used GE 404 F2J3 engine for the test. However, the latest test of LSP 2 was done with GE 404 IN20 engine, which is slightly more powerful than the earlier one. The IAF, in what are called the Air Staff Requirements (ASR), is asking for certain parameters to be met. Both the engines now fitted on the LCA do not meet the ASR completely.

An USN EP-3E ARIES II had a PLAN J-8II Finback air kill, back on 1 April 2001,

i am affraid you are wrong.. it was a accidentally mid air collision between the two, later the USN plane crash landed in chinese base and then got smashed into pieces before it was shipped to US.

my very first post and here it goes…

By Air Marshal Philip Rajkumar (retd)

-20 LCA will be produced by 2011 and the other 20 by 2016.
-Final Operational Clearance (FOC) expected by the year 2012-2013
-The second track should be for the re-engined Tejas Mk 2 which can be produced in the required numbers by 2020 or so. Finally, in the third track we can look at Tejas Mk 3 fitted with the Kaveri Mk 2 engine jointly developed with a foreign partner in the 2025 time frame. This aircraft should have Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar.

Programme Director (CA) and Director, Aeronautical Development Agency, P.S. Subramanyam

-Only for the FOC, we are planning to integrate the Beyond Visual Range (BVR) missile and some more conventional weapons.
–
This is what he had to say about Kaveri:
-Kaveri engine was fine for the LCA programme when it started. But as we have shifted the goal-post, which is the LCA weight, the Kaveri engine does not meet the ASR requirement. In the meantime, I am also requesting GTRE that technologies are available in the world to make the Kaveri engine fulfil the ASR requirements.
We used GE 404 F2J3 engine for the test. However, the latest test of LSP 2 was done with GE 404 IN20 engine, which is slightly more powerful than the earlier one. The IAF, in what are called the Air Staff Requirements (ASR), is asking for certain parameters to be met. Both the engines now fitted on the LCA do not meet the ASR completely.