My Experiences

We are reaching the goal of making our own Multirole fighter with Tejas Mk 2. At present it has been designed to be a single engine jet with General Electric F414-GE-INS6 turbofan engine. This engine has 58.5 kN (13,200 lbf) dry thrust and 98 kN thrust (22,000 lbf) with afterburner. The present expected weight of Tejas Mk 2 is as follows: 1. Gross Weight: 11,300 kg 2. Max Take Off Weight: 17,500 kg. That means payload capacity is 6,200 kg. Now this  General Electric F414  engine has a dry weight of 1,110 kg. Its thrust characteristics are sufficient for our expected Tejas Mk 2 aircraft. But if we have a twin-engine version then the range and reliability of the aircraft can be increased along with its size. The present wing area is 44 sq.m. Let us consider if we use our own Kaveri GTX-35VS engine. Its weight is 1,236 kg. With two engines total weight of engines will increase to 2,472 kg. While total thrust will be 104 kN dry to 162 kN with afterburner. This makes the max t...

In the previous article , the strength of Indian AirForce has been discussed. Let us analyze the Indian Navy strength in this article: 1. Ships : At a high level, we need to have sufficient number of ships to patrol our coastline, not considering the numerous islands like Andaman & Nicobar. This puts required number of ships to 467. Here it is assumed that each ship has speed of 30 km/h and 2 ships patrol together over the 7,000 km coastline. The available ships are only 90 as others are just small patrol boats. So the ratio between required vs available is 467 vs 90 i.e. 5. 2. Attack helicopters: Assuming 3 attack helicopters are required for every 2 ships, this comes to a need for 751 attack helicopters. We have only 110 attack helicopters available in 2020. So the ratio between required vs available is 751 vs 55 i.e. 14. This is a critical shortcoming of Indian Navy. 3. Destroyers: Assuming each destroyer operates 12 hours at a speed of 30 km/h, patrolling the maritime bord...

In the previous article , the strength of Indian Army has been discussed. Let us analyze the Indian Air Force strength in this article in 2020: 1. Fighter aircraft: A fighter aircraft covers around 2,400 km in 2 hours of flight time. With a patrol mission involving 3 aircraft covering our total boundary, the required number for 24 hours of protection is 333. By providing redundancy of 40% availability due to maintenance,  this number rises to 832. We have about 575 fighter aircraft involving Rafale, Mirage 2000, MiG 29, Sukhoi-30 MKI, Jaguar, MiG 21 and LCA Tejas Mk 1. So, the ratio between required vs available is : 832 vs 576 i.e. 1. So we have slightly less fighters and need to increase the number of our fighter pilots, as our enemy fighter strength increases. Also most of the fleet needs to be upgraded within the next 10-15 years. So, there is a need to involve private players to help HAL scale up production of LCA Tejas and other fighter jets like MWF, Tejas Mk 2 and S.P.O.R.T...

The recent events at LAC and LOC have brought into focus the level of preparedness of Indian Armed Forces. This analysis is for the 3 branches, namely Army, Air Force and Navy. This article is a basic study into the requirements for each force for weapon systems both for offense and defense. Let us see the basic facts first: 1. India has a very long border with China, Pakistan, Bhutan, Myanmar and Bangladesh. The strange part is the largest shared border among them is with Bangladesh. The total length of the border is about 15,200 km. 2. Also the maritime border is 7,000 km. Surprisingly, unknown to most we share this border with not only Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar, but also with Indonesia, Maldives and Thailand. To analyze and get basic idea about requirements for various kinds of defense equipment we can get guidance from the other armed forces of Top 10 military powers viz USA, China,  Russia,   France, Israel, Japan, Italy, Germany and UK. The goal is...

HAL has been on the for-front of making and upgrading fighter jets and helicopters for Indian Military since beginning. It has demonstrated critical capability by designing and developing LCA Tejas, ALH Dhruva, Rudra, LCH and trainer aircrafts (HTT-40). It has majority share of indigenously manufactured aircrafts and plays a key role in manufacturing and upgrading imported aircrafts like Sukhoi-30MKI, Mig 29-UPG and Mig 29K, under license. We see Indian air force  consisting of a rainbow of aircrafts imported or made under license from other nations. Here HAL plays a key role in increasing indigenous content of these aviation systems with time. But by the time the indigenous content increases to more than 50%, these aircrafts systems tend to become obsolete. So the hard work done in getting transfer of technology cannot be used on the same aircraft but can be used in design and development of new systems.  With time the key strength of HAL is R&D and the ability to satisfy...