LCA Tejas Mk1 & Mk1A - News and discussions
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Knowing how the French operate, in the next tranche they may quote a 40% hike in prices, reduce it by 20% & if the MMRCA 2.0 is awarded to them, they'd further reduce the price by 20% & claim - Voila - it's 20% cheaper to manufacture the Rafale in India.
Based on the above - the requirement is 200-250 Rafales + 300 single engine jets + 150+ 5-gen fighters?? What is the time frame?? But the tenders issued are only for 110 MMRCA2.0 + 57 Naval fighters (RFP issued??) + 83 LCA MK1A + "x" number of MWF?? Numbers don't add up.....
I want India to buy more Rafales + F-21s fast....no more russian planes......what is the chance of India buying F-21? given the China will not be pleased with such a purchase...
I dont see how we can buy both F-21 and more Rafales together. Seeing how strongly IAF pitched for Rafales, its hard to see them chose the F-16 remodel. Also our budget and logistic constraints wont have it. I hope we are focusing on keeping our platforms as homogeneous as possible. There was a time we had 35 different aircrafts in IAF.
More and more men are coming to a reality that
1. We need contemporary jets quickly.
2. Licence manufacturing a fighter jet increases its cost by 25-30% atleast, without any substantial gain in know how.
It would be better that Rafales are bought in batches of 36/48 aircrafts every 30-36 months.
In return infrastructure to fully complete the Repair, Overhaul, Upgrade and maintanence of Rafales happens in India with all the spares and LRUs production in India. That will be more helpful actually.
F21 is actually just a renamed F16 Block 70. Its chances of actually making it is very very low.
Yeah, the next 5 years, the best we can do is buy 36 more.
Since the threat assesment is already very high, geography comes into the picture since we need a good spread of bases carrying an optimum number of fighter jets in each base.
Yep. That's why considering all such factors, the IAF needs 200-250 jets. I have already explained the sort of distribution you will see once the fleet is inducted. It's the same story for SE MII.
If you play around with those numbers citing affordability, what that really means is we cannot afford to defend ourselves. So that sort of thinking won't be in the picture. All that will happen is the numbers will come in over a longer timeframe, as is happening now, due to the cancellation of the first MMRCA and the delaying of FGFA.
When the procurement number is large enough, the cost of building a production facility and training the manpower becomes cheaper in the long run, when the same facilities and manpower are needed for the upkeep of the large fleet. As far as Dassault is concerned, 90 jets are enough to make up for the cost of Indian production.
The cost of the entire production facility may not be any more than $2B. If you add that to the GTG cost of 36, we get $11B or $305M per unit. But we add the cost of 36 more, it comes down to $225M per unit, which is the same as the cost that we paid for French production. The cost will further decrease as the production stabilises over the long run. And this is not counting the upkeep cost of the jet over the next 50 years. And you can see an obvious savings in terms of forex as well.
Finance is a red herring. The cost of 36 jets over a 6-year period is just $1.5B per year. That's peanuts. It's just that a "massive modernisation" isn't on the agenda for a few more years, so we have "no money" until then. The fact is the IAF today has zero long term ongoing projects. All ongoing projects today are short term or borderline short term, at best 6 years, which can easily stress the budget. So there's a lot of room for long term projects.
The timeframe is long term, as much as 15 years or more.
The 114 MMRCA 2.0 can see additional options of 57. So we get as many as 171 jets through MMRCA. If we add 36 or 72 from the current deal, we get 207 to 243 jets. Add a squadron's worth as attrition replacement.
LCA will see 123 jets for now. At best, 2 or 3 more squadrons as options. At worst, will stay at 123. But the main SE component will be 200+ MWF. That's the jet the IAF actually wants.
The 57 naval fighters is a separate project, unrelated to the IAF's requirement. If the third carrier is killed, even this project may die. IN's main agenda seems to be indigenous fighters in the long run, like the TEDBF.
F-21 is junk. It's like the Mig-21 in 2000, undergoing the last Bison-esque upgrade possible. After this upgrade, there will be no more significant upgrade program from the US, and we will have to upgrade and support it ourselves, like we are doing with the Jaguar. Due to the dependency on America, we will simply get shafted on the price, just like the Jaguar engine upgrade. It already doesn't make sense to go for a rather dull aircraft, let alone go for it when the primary user will be ditching the aircraft 3 decades before we plan to do. Whatever we are buying today, we plan to operate until 2070-80. So the only real contenders are France and Sweden (And MWF will kill Gripen E, so only France).
Rafale and F-21, no chance. But Rafale and MWF, that's how it's going to be.
You can expect us to sign the Rafale deal by at least 2024, if the the RFP is released this year by June. And you can expect MWF to be signed at least by 2030. Both deals will be peanuts in comparison to the size of the economy by then.
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Not true in the long run.
Not even counting all the spin-off economic benefits like workers spending their salaries in India and generating both income and indirect taxes for the govt.
In terms of R&D, that argument has never made sense and never will. Totally unrelated people are developing our aerospace industry.
But in terms of manufacturing, it becomes really important. It's because our scientists were clueless about manufacturing that the LCA was a pain in the as* design.[/QUOTE]
Still very skeptical about MWF if its going to be inducted in 2030. We need to streamline our AF with multirole platforms. AMCA is supposed to be ready by 2030s. Will a 4+ generation fighter jet be viable into the next decade ? There are no 4th gen fighters in development. Everyone is going 5th gen and unmanned. If MWF can be seamlessly added to the production lines while Tejas Mk1A inductions are completed, it would make sense.
If the MWF fails, then Gripen E and F-21 will fight in a tender, and the overall program will be delayed. But that's unlikely to happen. The MWF is not a radical design, it's only a modernisation of an existing design.
After the first few days, even 5th gen fighter jets will fly like 4th gen jets.
There are plenty of non-stealth designs in various stages of development and procurement today. Rafale's procurement in France will continue through the 2030s, alongside India. The US plans to buy new F-15s and operate it all the way to 2100.
MWF will be an optionally-manned jet and will likely see a new production facility. The existing LCA facilities could be changed to MWF at a later date, once export prospects are exhausted. There should be plenty of countires that are poor today that will want to operate a jet 10 years down the line, especially the ones in Africa.
And that is why I do not think it will be inducted in 2030s. 2024 should be the target as by then the Mk1A's would have been delivered and MWF could be put to production. Delay in MWF will make it redundant.
Well, yes the F4 are a huge upgrade structurally and with the software too and the same with F15EX but those are all already existing fighters that have matured. Tejas still has a lot of tech development to be done. Wait, 2100 ??? For real ??? Cant be. No one can even predict that if manned systems will be viable in a decade.
Dont know about it being semi-autonomous. Its possible as we are developing the same for UCAV Ghatak.
Probably, but doing it by yourself increase your skill. It's a way of premaring the futur : autonomy.
What a strange opinion about the french !
The Rafale dry price built in France is well known, and already communicated to india top brass. I'm quite sure that 2024 F4 model price is already communicated.
The DRAL ecosystem is already paid by the 1st batch offsets. If the DRAL workers are a little bit more skilled than those of HAL (who required 2.7 more times to built a Rafale than french workers...) you may have fighters locally built under the french price.
It is the plan, from the very beginning.
Sir , this Company called DRAL will soon have to change its joint venture
Indian partner
[/QUOTE]
We now have a nice base with LCA imo.
We should simply keep importing Rafales directly. And seek investment in technologies where we lag.
No one is gonna help us in engines. We need to make HAL and DRDO work together on this front. Kaveri was developed seperately while HAL had licence and quite a bit know how of AL31FP , RD33 Series 3, engines of Jaguar/Hawk. That experience could have been useful. Also we need to improve funding here.
Rest 4 critical technologies identified for LCA , we are fine imo. Radar sensor (Uttam coming up fine, more resources need to be allocated and know how gained during absorption of Bars should be utilised) , the airframe and composites we are fine, for mission computers, avionics we are again fine. For EW we lag a bit , but work is on.
We should look to utilise the TEDBF airframe for IAF so as to make it available by 2035.
For Mirage 2000 overhaul, the program is not a big one in terms of numbers. We are more or less inspecting and repairing the airframe and then adding imported contents to it. Nothing much to be gained here.
An alternate deal where HAL got the know how to produce all spares and LRUs in India that would have been much better.
Current Mk1A delivery timeframe is 2022-29. A fully functional squadron will be raised only in 2024. And then a squadron a year. HAL wants to deliver the jets faster than that, but they have time until 2029. I believe MWF will not meet 2025 IOC. At least 2027 or 2028, with deliveries beginning in 2030+.
LCA development is almost already complete.
The life of the F-15EX is 20,000 hours without SLEP. So that's 80 years at 250 hours a year, that's 2100. It can be further increased by many decades.
Any old gen system will remain viable as long as the enemy's primary systems are taken out.
MWF will be autonomous. Not just remote-controlled.
Dassault actually wants to become a 100% owner of DRAL. But I think bade bhai is more likely to step in.
We should simply keep importing Rafales directly. And seek investment in technologies where we lag.[/quote]
That's wasteful. Especially when Dassault is already willing to begin Indian production with just another order of 36.
Their main goal is to make Falcons in India, and the same facility can also make Rafales.
Not even the French. MoD should have brought Safran in for certification of Kaveri K9 and K9+ 6 months after the deal was signed instead of negotiating a combined deal for the JV of K10. We would have had a fully certified engine by now.
It doesn't look like TEDBF will be anything more than a navy-specific project. If ADA is aiming to sell the jet to both IAF and IN, thereby making compromises on its design, then the entire project will fail. ADA should make the TEDBF an IN-specific jet only. The greed to obtain a large order by working only on an IAF version first is why N-LCA died. TEDBF will follow the exact same pattern and die out as well. Air force and navy jets are vastly different and should have two independent designs led by two different project teams. By 2035, IAF will have all the jets they need anyway, paving the way for AMCA Mk2. If necessary, the IAF would rather put more orders in for AMCA Mk1 instead of TEDBF.
That's wasteful. Especially when Dassault is already willing to begin Indian production with just another order of 36.
Their main goal is to make Falcons in India, and the same facility can also make Rafales.
Not even the French. MoD should have brought Safran in for certification of Kaveri K9 and K9+ 6 months after the deal was signed instead of negotiating a combined deal for the JV of K10. We would have had a fully certified engine by now.
It doesn't look like TEDBF will be anything more than a navy-specific project. If ADA is aiming to sell the jet to both IAF and IN, thereby making compromises on its design, then the entire project will fail. ADA should make the TEDBF an IN-specific jet only. The greed to obtain a large order by working only on an IAF version first is why N-LCA died. TEDBF will follow the exact same pattern and die out as well. Air force and navy jets are vastly different and should have two independent designs led by two different project teams. By 2035, IAF will have all the jets they need anyway, paving the way for AMCA Mk2. If necessary, the IAF would rather put more orders in for AMCA Mk1 instead of TEDBF.
Like Russia and US used to design their plane keeping in mind the capability of adversary's planes, we too should keep in mind the potential enemy to whom we are going to face in future. Our AMCA design should keep in mind J20 and J31 and any other potential chinese fighter in mind.