Samsara, no doubt an AF would like to buy the best money can buy. But take a look at the previous decade. Had MoD gone for M2K back then, do you think IAF would have still faced the chronic shortage of fighters? Would they have been forced to buy more MKI. And i can bet LCA would have already been in service if it wasnt for MMRCA. IAF is spoilt for choice & frustrated aswell with certain delays, & GoI cant see beyond political correctness. Hence all this.

Abhi, here is a really simple explanation for your ‘proven/mature’ thing. When an aircraft enters service or receives IOC etc, it does not mean its all the ways there. All fighters as a whole have bugs upon entry. These are discovered all the time & de-bugged, their op doctorines, logistic, maintenance etc being established & refined all the time, i.e. System maturing. These things take years. After a few years of service, an AF might feel strongly enough about a system that its functioning as intended, & we sometimes refer to that as proven.

For MMRCA’s intended goal IAF needs a mature system or something largely based on such a system. This is why LCA does not fit into it. While you can be reasonably sure that all MMRCA will perform ok once in IAF based on their service history, this cannot be said of LCA. Who knows what other glitches the programme might face in future. What if some nasty weakness is discovred after first 20 fighters or there are a few crashes, & the entire fleet has to be grounded for sometime? Of course, it could happen with any other fighter, but LCA being a new design has far greater chances of such a thing than others.

No douct LCA is important for India. But it simply does not fit into IAF’s future goals wrt MMRCA.

Thank you tp for your contribution. Hopefully this would help Abhi to understand that not every AF or institute has to follow LCA route to IOC etc or announce every single event to media media. LCA people have to do it, coz the project has faced a fair amount of criticism in the past, so any progress is a positive thing.

Regarding your earthtimes article. I cant see it. But i will give you a better one-google for it & you will get the entire thing. Its AFM-Jan 2010? issue, & Alan Warnes is the leading authority on JF-17 outside Pak. You will be able to see a timeline of the project in that article. There were only two flying protos with DSI (PT 4 & 6) and PT 1, 2 were conventional flying. PT 2, 5 were also conventional for static testing- 5 came out way before 4: dont ask me why. Sept 2008 issue-& by this time PAF already had 8 machines-clearly states dat 04 WILL join PAF though i have never seen any evidence of that. Going back to Jan 2010 issue, it will show you that the first two arriving in pak in Mar 07 (01 & 02) were from SPB (not PT as you assume). SPB 03-05 came in Feb 08 while SPB 06-08 arrived a month later. In total 8 SPB machines- NO PROTOTYPE. We know that 09 & 10 were the first two full production machines from & 11 was assembled by PAC. Again NO PROTOTYPES. Go on & prove me wrong with such reputable sources. And no pak is not alone in this sense. You stated that IOC for F-16 was achieved in 1979? Any ideas of the exact date? Coz i can tell you that first FSD machine-you can call it a PT: separate from demonstrator YF-16-made its first flight in Dec 1976. First full production aircraf enter USAF SERVICE on 6 Jan 1979, & according to you it was assigned IOC sometime in 1979-when exactly would help. BUT HANG ON. Dat sounds strange. Only 2 years from 1st FSD machine or PT to service entry and only 2-3 years to IOC. I mean F-16 did have a fbw and had to open up its flight envelope before IOC. And all that within 2-3 years. Wow man…contd in next post

Abhi, sorry mate, but you have abs NO idea of what you are talking about. Show me a credible link of what you are saying, i.e. first two delivered to PAF were prototypes. Since 2-3 of the remaining were also protos according to this ‘wide speculation’ that only you are aware of, i dont think you will have any problem finding links to them either.
But please try to get your head around a little issue here. PT series had only 2 machines with DSI intakes. So where do you get this definite 2 & speculative 2-3? But i’ll wait for your links.

Regarding years of testing. Once again you are messing up the timelines. PAF inducted the machine in 2009. That 6 years from its first flight. Since you keep saying, no other airforce, did you check F-16 timelines as i suggested? Also, show us some link covering the bestowing of IOC status on J-10.

To be frank, your issue is LCA. You think everything through LCA timelines & so on. In real world not everything revolves around LCA.

Samsara, i find myself in agreement with you about linear correlation. I remember reading a book about stealth planes years ago, & it mentioned some old plane-dont remember the name but im sure it was a metal -which (completely unitentionally) has a RCS value fairly smaller than many other similar designs of that era even later eras. If i recall correctly, RCS is a poduct of angles, surfaces, material reflectivity, engine/intakes, cockpit/canopy, RAM treatment & many other factors. So to say that LCA might have a smaller RCS than Gripen cos of its smaller size is not necessarily true because of different designs. Heck im not even sure that its a 1:1 sort of relationship, i.e. Does a 1:7 real life LCA model has 7* lower RCS value than a normal LCA?

For PAF, dispersed ops have become a part of their op doctorine because of their lack of strategic depth, limited number of bases etc & we’ll see it mature over the years. For IAF, this is not the case for reasons already mentioned by others.

So an IAF official has said something about PAF using the roads for this purpose. Whats the big deal if he said so…at least i dont see anything significant in his remarks and i do find myself in agreement with my indian friends on this one.

But having said the above, lets rewind a bit. It was a while back when some of my indian friends were referring to some remarks by a PAF official about some indian product as unprofessional while my pakistani friends were saying whats the big deal. I must add that i found myself agreeing with the latter on that ocassion.

Point being we have heard such remarks from both sides before and im sure we will hear them again. So besides the personal egos of individuals on this fora, blind patriosm which makes one feel compelled to defend anything & everything, and a desire to prove mine is longer, WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL GENTLEMEN? 😉

Abhi, how easy you make it look. RCS and all. I envy you man. 🙂

Kramer, thanks for that detailed response. I would only comment on the v last paragraph though. You say that its not right to paint the entire aircraft with the same brush generalising….. I guess we just lost each other somewhere down the line, but i have been trying to say exactly the same thing througout our discussion. 🙂

Having said the above, when people-even experts-write about an aircraft and its gen, normally all we get to see is 2nd, 3rd, 4th gen etc. This + concept is not too old either & at present is not applied universallz. No one hardly talks about these fighters & their gen in as much detail as you have done so in your post above & frankly no one has time for that. We just make up our minds & call it that. If i asked you to re-classify the above aircraft, you might call lets say Bison a 2nd gen machine cos it doesnt meet all the requirements of a 3rd gen. But then there would be those who would argue…but it has a 3rd gen this and 4th gen this, so it should be reclassified as a 3rd gen-as a compromise. To an expert like yourself you might reclassify it as 2+, ++, +++ etc. But if someone calls it a 3rd gen cos it incorporates many 4th gen elements, to many it would be an acceptable compromise, though it might not meet all the requirements of a 3rd gen & hence shouldnt get that title strictly speaking. I hope its clear now.