Offficial flight of LCH on May 21st

Courtesy: Angle of Attack




The first official fight of the Light Combat Helicopter will take place on 21st of this month. The flight will take place in front VIPs, defense ministry officials and military officials. LCH has completed a few confidence building flight in and around HAL airport Bangaluru. LCH is expected to enter service before 2015.

Akash and its way ahead

Many of you might have already known that 'Akash' is a DRDO developed Surface to Air missile(SAM). It is a medium range surface to air missile defense system developed as part of Integrated Guided Missile Development Program.

Although this missile in development since 1990's, DRDO has announced only in 2008 that missile development is complete. However, after the evaluations, even though missile did exceptionally well by hitting all its targets in all tests IAF has went ahead and placed orders 2 squadrons as a face saving burial for the project. However, IAF later found he missile performance to be satisfactory and placed orders for 16 more launchers to form 2 more squadrons for India's northeast theater. Now the latest news are that even the Indian Army is evincing interest in Akash. Its good news all the way for DRDO and Akash.


Akash is indeed a very formidable missile, but with few inherent drawbacks in it. First, the missile is too big in size for a 25-30KM missile. Owing to its sheer size, Akasha carrier will be able to carry only 3 ready to fire missiles on it. This is a serious drawback particularly in tactical situations where your enemy is flying to you and after three missiles, you are left with an empty salvo, meaning you need more number of carriers. Second, range of the missile is not sufficient enough to cover the vast aircspace of our country. Even though the rajendra radar can detect and track an incoming target at 60KM away, missile can take it only when it is within 30KM. With the proliferation of anti radiation missiles this window of 30KM is more than enough for the enemy to fire the missile and skoot rendering the missile system useless. Third is its weight. At 720kg, Akash missile is a heavy missile in its class. This restricts the missile carrying vehicle options only to heavy carriers.

With all the aforementioned shortcomings, the scope and areas of enhancement for this system are aplenty. If they can reduce the size and weight of the missile, it will only become much better SAM system. But this requires additional time and resources and would have be worthless investment when aren't many takers for it. Now that the economies of scale looking good, DRDO can dare to invest additional resources and offer its initial takers a much improved product.


- Image of the Akash and its carrier shown above is copyrighted to Frontier India Defense and Strategic News Service

Nothing much interesting happening of late

Nothing very interesting is happening lately in Indian Defense arena. However, we can expect some thing later this month when our defense minister A.K Anthony goes on a visit for Russia.
During his Russia visit, India and Russia will sign a joint declaration on co-developing Indo-Russian Multi Role Transport Aircraft based on IL-214 airframe. It is also known that they will also be discussing a contract on upgrading the Su-30MKI. Unconfirmed news are that next round of price negotiations for Admiral Gorshkov may take place during this time. Just to notify, India has bought the mothballed Soviet aircraft cruiser Admiral Gorshkov from Russian in 2004. Under the contract, Russia will give the ship free of cost but India has to pay for its retrofitment costs and for its air complement of 12 MiG 29K's. Since then both countries have failed to agree to a final price with Russia demanding more money while India negotiating on reducing the asked amount.

India is also planning to conduct several missile tests including underwater launched brahmos missile as well as Sagarika/Shaurya missile anytime this year apart from the other missile systems which are already inducted. Even though most of these tests user trials, information is that many new systems are incorporated into them and these tests are to validate those systems.

Another news, though not directly related India's defense but may have implications in it, is that U.S President Obama has once again assured the US congress that he will not let India continue developing its nuclear missile programme. Need to wait and watch how our political fraternity is going to respond to this. Me for one thinks that US is the most unreliable ally and should care less about our relationship with it. After all, normal relationship will anyway be maintained even if we don't try hard.

Well, that's all for now. This is a test post to test the option of email posting. Hope it works.

- Try my other blog Views-de-Venu

Early indigenous aircrafts of India

Many budding defense enthusiasts are under the misconception that LCA Tejas is the first indigenous aircraft built by India. They are probably unaware of the indigenous fighter bomber - The HF-24 Marut which India has already built and operated fighter bombers way back in early 60's.



Designed by famous German designer Kurt Tank and built by Hindustan Aeronautics, now HAL, the Hindustan Fighter HF-24 Marut was India's first jet aircraft, flying first on 17 June 1961. Even though it was designed as a supersonic aircraft, it was never flown in its full potential because of the lack of suitable power.


After the first nuclear tests by India in 1974, international sanctions prevented India from acquiring suitable engines to power this aircraft at supersonic speeds. Even the spares for the existing engines were difficult to obtain because of the international denials. This forced IAF towards the early retirement of the aircraft from the service.


Even though lack of power heavily curtailed the potential of this aircraft, it received laurels from the pilots because of its excellent flight characteristics and is liked by all pilots.It was used in combat in the ground attack role, where its safety features such as manual controls whenever the hydraulic systems failed and twin engines were looked upon favorably and increased survivability.


Taking to this favorable features, a total of 147 aircraft are built for IAF. Last Marut in IAF colours flew in the year 1990 before getting retired from active service. Plans were also drawn to build HF -73, an uprated and reheated version of its predecessor HF-24. This new aircraft is supposedly shared many design features of Su-25 of soviet except that it does not have variable geometry wings. However, it was never productionized as the test flight of reheated HF-24 with a new engine failed miserably when it crashed killing the test pilot. This made the plans of building HF-73 to remain at drawing boards. Later on, IAF went ahead and ordered Soviet origin MiG-21's to fill that role.

Two decades later, India again started folding sleeves to build a modern, supersonic jet fighter to replace aging MiG-21's and to add punch to its arsenals, The LCA Tejas. Even though India doesn't have any technological sanctions on it when new plans are drawn, it is still a difficult task as it has to close the technology gap created over the two decades. This proved to be a daunting task and when everything looked fine, the second round of nuclear tests have again created hindrances for acquiring critical technologies which further delayed LCA. LCA, is now currently undergoing rigorous flight tests and is again facing the same problem of low engine power as its older cousin Marut.

Now that they are planing to rechristen LCA Tejas as HF, lets pray to God that it gets only the name and not the fate.


-All images copyrighted to thier respective owners and may be removed if asked to do so.

Recycle, Repair and Refurbish when ever possible

Conventional wisdom says we should make best use of resources. That is twice as much true when one is talking about weapons. Weapons are not a cheap entity for them to be easily replaced like shoes and clothes. They need billions of dollars of investment and years of time to induct and operationalize. Hence the best method is to make maximum and best use of them. Having said that, care also needs to be taken so that these weapons do not become obsolete. The only way to keep them up-to-date and available to maximum extent is to have them repaired, refurbished and upgraded regularly.


Indian Navy should be commended in the first place for inculcating this in their operational procedures. They are still using the venerable Sea Harriers by regularly upgrading them to the latest standards. Ofcourse, they reached their final leg and time for their honorable retirement has come. Indias sole aircraft carrier is decades old. It is still being used by IN and is considered as deadly as anyother aircraft carrier of its type. Even as we are reading this, it is being upgraded with latest eqipment for it to serve IN for another 5-6 years. The successor of Viraat, the INS Vikramaditya is also a refurbished- for-Indian-needs type and is currently being upgraded in Russia, expected to join IN somewhere in 2012. The cost of buying an all new aircraft carrier will be way too much expensive for a growing country like India. With its growing maritime influence, India needs number to be present everywhere and to do that we need cheap at the same time potent ships. This can be acheived only by inducting new ones and also carefully maintaining and upgrading the older ones. IN has unmderstood that and kudos to them.


Indian Army is not behind either. You will be surprised to know that IA has not recieved a single artillery equipment since 2 decades. They are still depending on euipment obtained in 80's to safe guard their borders. They do so by regularly upgrading them to maintain their lethality. However, they let us down when they are reluctant to induct Arjun into their arsenals. IA should learn to fight effectively with what they have instead of what they want. They should have inducted the Arjun, keep in constant touch with its makers and have the deficiencies overcome gradually. That way, you can have an indigenous potent weapon. But unfortunately that didn't happen.


Indian Airforce is a different story all together. Actually I am a bit confused by their stand. On one hand, they are still operating the age old, very venerable MiG-21's by upgradinig them but are reluctant to do the same for basic trainers. Very recently they have placed proposal to buy them off the shelf trainers from foreign vendors. This is going to cost millions of dollars. Instead, they should start working with HAL in identifying the problem in the present HPT-32 and look for ways to mitigate them. Change its engine, upgrade it and use it. This way it can be quickly put into induction. Going for a new foreign origin trainer aircraft which is only used to teach basics of flight to rookies is just not worthy of it. IAF should have shown this same urge for replacing the MiG-21's which are very demanding and less tolerant to errors from trainee pilots. Why the lax there and why being serious here, that when the problem with the HPT-32 can be easily taken care of unlike with the MiG's.


Looks like our IAF need to get some lessons from IN Environmentalists.

-All Images are copyrighted to their respective 0wners.

Defence preparedness - Why do we make so much noise?

Looking at the alarms being raised by media about the chinese aggression on the northern border and Indian armed forces responding to it by deploying in the forward posts, my first thought is that we are unnecessarily creating the noise which will do no good other than alarming your enemy.

Its strange that governor of Arunachal Pradesh has given a public statement about raising a mountain division. By letting out such strategic decissions, we are loosing an edge that we may other wise. When you are telling loud about your forces, you are in a way loosing the advantage of giving the enemy an element of surprise. Afterall it was said that, Know your enemy and half the battle is won. I never saw any other country telling out loud about their operational deployments in the media. They are better kept as secrets.