India: LCA Tejas by 2010 - But Foreign Help Sought With Engine
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India’s fighter strength has been declining in recent years, as the MiG-21s that form the largest component of its fleet are lost in crashes, or retired due to age and wear. Some MiG-21s are being modernized to MiG-21bis ‘Bison’ configuration, while other current fighter types are undergoing modernization programs in order to maintain the fighter force until replacements can arrive. On which note, an ongoing tender has Russian, French, American, Swedish and European manufacturers dueling for a multi-billion dollar, 126+ plane light-medium fighter sale.
This still leaves India without a low-end solution to the twin problems besetting its overall fleet: numbers, and age. The MiG-21bis program adds years of life to those airframes, but that extended lifespan is still quite finite; by 2020, it is very unlikely that any MiG-21s will remain in service. As for the MMRCA program, it may replace some of India’s mid-range fighters – but that still leaves replacement of the MiG-21 fleet unfulfilled. In this environment, the status of the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) project matters a great deal to the Indian Air Force’s future prospects, as their level of confidence in its longer-term success will affect their immediate buys. The choices made in the LCA’s design will also affect the lightweight fighter’s export potential, which in turn feeds back into the overall program’s costs and viability for India over its lifetime.
The latest additions to this article include a whirlwind of developments around the indigenous Kaveri engine. As some predicted, the Kaveri engine project’s performance failures have finally killed it as a fighter engine; its place will be filled by GE’s F404 for now, ad a foreign development partnership has been struck with France’s Snecma. The indigenous radar project has also run into severe trouble, so IAI Elta has been tapped as a foreign partner, and Israeli radars are about to be fitted so testing can go forward…
- LCA Tejas: India’s Lightweight Fighter, or Just a Lightweight?
- The Kaveri Engine: Keystone, or Killer? [updated]
- Updates and Events [updated]
- Appendix A: DID Analysis & Op/Ed (2006)
- Appendix B: Additional Readings & Sources
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