For several years now we have been writing on 3 Longs & Shorts about HAL’s inability to produce a usable fighter jet for the Indian Air Force. Amongst the many adverse consequences of this is the fact that the Indian Air Force today has fewer squadrons than it has had in the past three decades.
Now after the tragic death of Wing Commander Namansh Syal at the Dubai Air Show, we highlight Shekhar Gupta’s timely piece in which he highlights the decades of incompetence & delays which led to the Indian Air Force being put in this position.
Through the 1950s & 60s to this India – under Prime Minister Nehru – had tried and failed to build a fighter jet:
“Foreseeing this, in the mid-1950s Nehru decided to build a domestic, supersonic jet fighter. He spotted German Kurt Tank, designer of a most successful Luftwaffe fighter FW-190 (FW for the Focke-Wulf), more than 20,000 copies of which flew and fought in World War II. Since Tank was no Nazi, he was among those in demand internationally. He was initially hired by Argentina but soon unemployed as Juan Peron lost power. Nehru brought him to India as director of the Madras Institute of Technology. Tank quickly put together a team of Indian engineers. One of them was a young man called APJ Abdul Kalam.
The design of what was named HF-24 Marut was great. But there was no engine. In the course of time Tank left and India persisted.
The aspiration of breaking the sound barrier was never realised. The maximum it did was Mach .93 and that with two Orpheus engines, which India was making for the tiny, single-engine Gnat.”
Then in the 1970s America’s willingness to give the Pakistanis state-of-the-art fighter jets put India on the backfoot. That in turn contributed to the restart (in 1983) of India’s second attempt to build an indigenous fighter jet. What followed over the next four decades belies claims made by successive governments that they are somehow making India stronger:
“The government first cleared what it then called the light combat aircraft (LCA) in 1983. The head of the Defence Research and Development Organisation then, a fine metallurgist VS Arunachalam (in his forties), would sometimes say, in self-deprecating humour: Call it “the last chance for Arunachalam”. Between him and fantastic aeronautical scientists they put together a great team. We had a design ready soon enough.
Then, it took another 18 years to take its first flight, having been named Tejas by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It took another 12 years for initial operational clearance (IOC), another further six for full operational clearance (FOC). The story continues.”
In recent years, another problem has kicked-in: social media trolling. As Mr Gupta explains: “Lately any valid customer’s impatience from the IAF or demand for new foreign fighters has been attacked viciously on social media. There are suggestions that until the IAF is willing to accept something, maybe “10-15 per cent” below the ideal, our domestic technologies can’t progress. Anybody asking for a faster filling of the gaps is dismissed as “Import Bahadur”. The forces, trained to keep silent, unfortunately, make a poor lobby for themselves. Or they’d tell you that in a combat nobody offers you a handicap because you are catching up.
This tragic loss in Dubai and the sacrifice of an incredibly skilled young life are an important moment to reflect on our self-inflicted limitations and air power gaps.”
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