Tejas: The flight of freedom

The news from Bahrain Air Show is exhilarating. The Indian Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), Tejas, captured everybody’s imagination by its flight manoeuvres. The two ace pilots Commodore Maolankar and Group Captain Rangachari made the nation proud with impressive aerobatics that pushed the aircraft against eight times the gravity pull, the so-called 8G. If we have to believe the rumour mills of the air show, a few countries have shown interest in acquiring our Tejas for their fleet. The dream of every Indian aircraft designer — of building a globally sought after aircraft — is now being realised. It has been a long time coming, almost two decades after the country decided to design and build an indigenous fighter aircraft.

The story of indigenous design in those decades before the LCA programme was launched was a depressing one. After the HF-24 Marut, there were no indigenous design efforts to speak of. India lost a generation of aeronautical engineers to other countries since we had no aircraft programmes of our own worth speaking about. In spite of Bengaluru having many aeronautical laboratories, there was no programme to integrate the expertise.

The lack of a programme was demoralising and this prevented the building up of cooperative research and development projects. In the early ’80s, the country’s political leadership realised the importance of an indigenous aircraft to replace the ageing MiG fleet.

In 1982, one of us (V.S. Arunachalam) was appointed as a scientific adviser to the defence minister. His appointment was considered unusual at that time as this was the first time a Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) scientist was appointed to that post, was much younger than the conventional appointee to the post of secretary. He in turn chose a young design engineer (Kota Harinarayana) as programme director for an indigenous aircraft programme. There were many steps that were considered unusual at that time. We insisted that this programme should not be run by a government department or by a corporation, but by a society. Unlike a government programme with the attendant bureaucracy, the society format provided both financial and organisational flexibility.

Thus, the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) was born. As we wanted the programme to start immediately, we bypassed the conventional methods of recruitment. We invited and took on deputation over hundreds of professionals from Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and many scientists and engineers from DRDO and Council of Scientific & Industrial Research laboratories. Overnight, ADA became a viable dynamic society with a clear mandate to build an outstanding fighter aircraft for the nation.

This was also one of the rare occasions where the laboratory, industry and academia, irrespective of their organisational structure, worked as a single unit. The political and administrative leadership, enthused by ADA’s commitment and the speed of implementation, joined in the chorus. The administrative and financial decisions came fast and in affirmation. It looked as though the whole nation wanted an indigenous aircraft and was willing to adapt novel strategies to realise this goal.

For validating our designs we planned to work with a few foreign design bureaus and also gain access to some of their facilities and design tools. This was during the Cold War. Foreign countries jealously guarded their technical capabilities and refused to share these with others. They were also not confident of India’s capability of building an aircraft. A few other countries sent their senior defence officials, ostensibly to persuade us to abandon the design programme: “Too hard and too difficult to build good aircraft”, they argued. Newspaper articles were also plenty, criticising ADA’s reckless ambition with little competence and track record. But we persevered.

For the design, our engineers chose a compound tailless delta configuration, different from other aircraft of this class. We also chose advanced carbon composite material for most of the airframe and airwings that made the aircraft light with minimal radar image. The cockpit was designed to be most up-to-date where everything was digital and software driven. For the fly-by-wire system that controls the flight, we chose a digital system with sufficient redundancy. Our foreign consultants were hesitant to recommend this design and, in fact, walked out of the assignment.

All these technologies were subject to embargos and denials by Western nations. In fact, at one stage, the United States prevented our acquiring even normal electronic components in reaction to the Pokhran tests. These denials and embargos only made us more determined. The Tejas’ carbon composite airframe, utility systems, quadruplex digital flight control system, and the weapon management system — all considered complex — were designed and built in India itself. Thanks to the budding indigenous capabilities, all the core technologies were developed within the country.

Thousands of men and women, drawn from across the length and breadth of the country, have worked tirelessly for over two decades to bring the aircraft to this stage of development. Thus, the LCA programme not only enabled design and development competence in ADA, but also setup the National Flight Test Centre to test the aircraft’s flight performance. At the time of writing, the Tejas has flown 3,061 sorties totalling 1,954 flight hours without a single accident. This may be a world record in prototype development. Soon, the aircraft will enter service and perform on the frontline.

Our responsibility now is to provide the defence services with a large numbers of aircraft in adequate time. Our design and development capability must be converted into highly competent and state-of-the-art manufacturing. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s persuasion to “Make in India” finds an excellent response in the Tejas programme.

Dr Kota Harinarayana was the programme director and chief designer of LCA programme. Dr V.S. Arunachalam, former scientific adviser to the defence minister, is chairman, CSTEP, Bengaluru