9 hours Ago By Rajat Pandit
NEW DELHI: India plans to 'accelerate' the development and induction of its own ambitious fifth-generation stealth fighter jet, with a top-level committee now working to evolve a clear-cut strategy and production-cum-business model for the swing-role advanced medium combat aircraft (AMCA). The committee chaired by defence secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh, which includes IAF vice chief Air Marshal S P Dharkar, secretary (defence production) Sanjeev Kumar and top officials from DRDO and Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA), is slated to submit its report next month. This comes at a time when Pakistan is looking to acquire at least 40 J-35A stealth fifth-generation jets from China, which is now brandishing even sixth-generation prototypes.
China has already deployed its fifth-generation Chengdu J-20 jets at its airfields facing India like Hotan and Shigatse, as reported earlier by TOI. Faced with this, coupled with the huge delay in production of the fourth-generation Tejas jets by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), a source told TOI that the committee's aim is to "devise how best to get AMCA from the drawing board into the air by shrinking timelines and improving efficiency, including a good workable production-cum-business model with much greater private sector participation". The committee will also consider the plan for indigenous development of a 110 kilonewton thrust-class engine to power the 25-tonne AMCA with foreign technology collaboration.
Aero-engine majors like US General Electric, French Safran and British Rolls-Royce are in the fray for this. The new panel was formed after another defence secretary-led committee chalked out a detailed roadmap for IAF's "all-round capability enhancement" to plug existing operational gaps in a time-bound manner. The report was presented to defence minister Rajnath Singh on March 3, as was then reported by TOI.
The PM-led cabinet committee on security in March last year had cleared the full-scale engineering development of five prototypes of the twin-engine AMCA at an initial cost of over Rs 15,000 crore. The AMCA, with the requisite thrust-to-weight ratio, advanced sensor fusion and stealth features like an internal weapons bay and "serpentine air-intake", however, will be ready for production only by 2035 at the earliest as per existing timelines. "It will be a challenge to compress timelines but a major effort has to be made due to IAF's expanding technological shortfalls," another source said, in the backdrop of IAF currently making do with just 30 fighter squadrons when 42.
5 are authorised. At least eight more squadrons are slated for retirement over the next 10 years. IAF currently plans to induct seven squadrons (126 jets) of the expensive AMCA, which will also have AI-powered electronic pilot systems, netcentric warfare systems, integrated vehicle health management and the like.
While the first two squadrons will be powered by GE-F414 engines in the 98 kilonewton thrust class, the next five will have 110 kilonewton engines. In the interim, the dwindling numbers are to be progressively made up by induction of 180 Tejas Mark-1A fighters (for around Rs 1.2 lakh crore) and 108 more capable Tejas Mark-2 jets .
Parallelly, the long-pending project to manufacture 114 4.5-generation multi-role fighter aircraft (MRFA) with foreign collaboration as reported by TOI earlier..
