The Navy chief’s decision to reject the LCA-Navy fighter plane is an unfortunate blow to self-reliance in military technology, NITI Aayog member and former DRDO director-general V.K. Saraswat said on Sunday.
Defending the home-grown fighter being developed for the Navy, Dr. Saraswat said hopefully good sense would prevail and the naval fighter, which can be as good as any foreign contender, would go into production. He was speaking at the Aero India seminar which opened here.
In a global environment where the international community denies India the technology it needs to develop its own defence products, decision makers must not lose faith in the capabilities of Indian developer agencies, Dr. Saraswat, who headed the DRDO during 2011-13, said.
“There are reports that the LCA is not meeting the requirements of the Navy and that two of its engines have played truant” even as 1,500 other engines of the same manufacturer have performed well. “And that makes the LCA Navy suffer,” he regretted.
The decision to dump it defies logic and distracts from the path of self-reliance, he said, and added that these must be explained in a transparent manner.
A question mark hangs over the fate of the indigenous naval fighter aircraft after Admiral Sunil Lanba, who said last December that the LCA was overweight and had a lower thrust, among others, and did not meet the Navy’s requirements.
Last month, the government put out a request for information to aircraft manufacturers about its intent to buy around 57 multirole carrier borne or ship-based fighters for the Navy. Sweden’s SAAB has offered its Gripen maritime variant, Boeing its F-18 Super Hornet and Dassault Rafale.
LCAs for the Air Force and the Navy are being developed by the Aeronautical Development Agency under the DRDO at a cost of ₹57,000 crore. The IAF version has been inducted and is getting a few final battle-grade finishes.
Comparing it with SAAB’s Gripen, Dr. Saraswat said the Indian version also had the same GE 414 engine, “so where is the question of low thrust?” The other specified features were being added in the next model, such as the arrester hook for landing.
He hoped that the Shore-Based Test Facility built in Goa just to test the take-off and landing of naval aircraft should not go waste.
On Saturday, ADA director Cdr. C.D. Balaji and DRDO chairman S. Christopher defended the product and said second model, LCA-NAvy Mark II, would be fully complying with the Navy’s specifications.
