Defence: LCA; Grounded Again

Defence

India Today
Sep 21,1998

LIGHT COMBAT AIRCRAFT
Grounded Again

The US sanctions are only the latest in the series of snags hitting the long delayed LCA project.

By Stephen David

Grounded Again The May 1998 Pokhran blasts that took India into the elite nuclear club created a dent, not just on the desert sands of Rajasthan, but also on several defence projects, notably the ambitious and much-delayed Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) project. Two years after it began, in 1983, the Rajiv Gandhi government decided to make the project a showcase of the new climate of cooperation between India and the United States, overriding the claims of the French and the Germans who had been collaborating with the Hindustan Aeronautical Ltd (HAL) till then.

Today, as part of the measures to coerce India to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle, the US has pulled out of the project, leaving the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and the HAL scrambling to meet the much-revised deadline of 1999 for its first flight. Says a sceptical aviation expert: "The US sanctions may have given the DRDO its latest excuse to skip even this deadline." Project Director Kota Harinarayana, who heads the Bangalore-based Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) that designed the aircraft, is putting on a brave face. "We may be delayed by another five or six months," he maintains, "but the advantage now is that we will be totally indigenous."

This touch of bravado seems all-pervasive. On August 19, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, scientific adviser to the defence minister, told a seminar on aeronautical research that there is the possibility of 200 LCAs being inducted into the Indian Air Force (IAF) between 2003 and 2010, offering Rs 30,000 crore worth of business to HAL. An air force officer says the figure is "wildly optimistic" as no such order has been placed for the LCA and the Rs 1,600 crore needed for setting up production facilities is still awaited.

The LCA was rolled out in the presence of the then prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao at HAL's premier Bangalore facility on November 17, 1995. At the time it was said that the maiden flight trials would take place in early 1997. The dates were revised to June 1998 and now, says ADA, thanks to the US pull-out, the LCA will take off only in early 1999, sometime between February and April.

Within a week of the May 1998 explosions, many scientists who were working on different areas linked to LCA were asked to pack their bags for India by an annoyed Uncle Sam. Many of them were part of an Aeronautical Development Establishment (ADE) team working with aerospace giant Lockheed Martin in Binghamton, New York, to validate a computerised control law software for onboard computers which will ultimately fly the aircraft. ADE had an agreement with Lockheed Martin to develop flight control systems on the fighter aircraft by September 1998. If this deadline had been met, DRDO scientists maintain, they would have had the first test flight at the December 1998 Air Show in Bangalore followed by commercial production by around 2002. ADE Director K.G. Narayanan says that the "sanctions have not really been fatal though we miss out on the rich experience of the Lockheed Martin facility". A team of scientists, called the National Control Law Team, is working on the software at the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL). Besides the software, the Americans are now denying key components like hydraulic actuators -- that help to manoeuvre the aircraft, gain altitude or determine the trajectory -- and the ring-laser gyros to make inertial navigation systems. According to officials, both systems will have to be obtained from alternate sources.

Says Harinarayana: "The flight control system is the key thing in the LCA and we were halfway through when the sanctions came. In addition, we were considering the import of key items like generators, pumps and valves, but now our own teams will develop them."

Another major American input is the engine. In 1985, the US authorised India to purchase its frontline GE-404 engine. Eleven of them were purchased to be fitted onto the early versions of the aircraft, pending the development of the indigenous Kaveri engine being developed by Bangalore's Gas Turbine Research Establishment. After Pokhran, GE has withdrawn its technical support personnel. The LCA team is pinning all its hopes now on the Kaveri. Tests on two of the six Kaveri engines began in the second week of August at a premier Russian aerodynamic agency in Cima, about 60 km from Moscow. A series of three tests over a period of two years will examine the aircraft's ability to withstand low pressure and temperature at high altitudes.

Aviation expert Roddam Narasimha, former director of NAL and currently director of the National Institute of Advanced Studies located at the Indian Institute of Science campus in Bangalore, accepts that the LCA "is a bit too ambitious a project". However, he points out, "Technology development is a long-drawn affair, especially in countries like India, and the advanced technology involved in this project could itself have led to the delay."

The delay in the project must be seen in the context of a country that has not designed a jet fighter since the 1960s when it made the HF-24 (whose engine was British). The Kaveri engine which is designed to meet the conditions of operating fighters in the Indian environment is perhaps technologically more challenging than the airframe. The Rs 2,188 crore invested so far on the LCA has not been extravagant considering that this is being stretched to the design of production version aircraft in addition to the two prototypes. Substantial responsibility for the delay also rests with Delhi. For four years between 1990 and 1994, all work came to a standstill as the Defence Ministry refused to release the much-needed foreign exchange because of economic stringency.

Bureaucratic procedures that demand clearance and sanctions at various stages have also contributed to the delay. Perhaps the biggest worry facing the designers is the lack of interest shown by the IAF which remains an import-happy service. The problem for the IAF and, for that matter the country, is that its ambitious project to upgrade 100 Mig-21 BIS aircraft, too, seems to be in the doldrums. And this has opened up serious gaps in the air force's battle order for the early years of the 21st century.

HAL Chairman and Managing Director C.G. Krishnadas Nair, just back from Moscow, says, "We are hopeful of tiding over the sanctions, it is only a matter of time. We are optimistic about having the LCA more or less on schedule." On Kalam's ambitious projection of about 200 LCA aircraft to be manufactured by HAL, Nair says that for the time being, the numbers are not as important "as the task at hand". He has also refused to comment on the investments required to manufacture the aircraft. "All I can say is that it is too early to talk about it," he says. Perhaps that itself says a lot about the state of preparedness right now.

And that is something that India is waiting for to take off.

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