3.3 Regarding engine design capabilities, Secretary, DRDO further informed the Committee as under:
Worldwide, an aircraft building centers on two or three important issues design and building. One is that ability to do what I call basic airframe, lending gear and integrating systems, and buying out parts. It may be avionics; it may be engine; and it could be radar. These are technology intensive products. Generally, you will find that the aircraft builder does not build engine. Boeing builds aircraft but it does not build engine. General Electric builds engine, and Pratt & Whitney builds engine.
We do not have an industrial base in this country for engine design. We manufactured a few Russian engines under license in Koraput. That does not automatically make you a designer. If you are producing an ambassador car, we could not produce another car. It is not that we were not producing the car but the design engineering capability is something very unique and distinct.
What I want to tell is that understanding a capability to productionize a part does not automatically gives you a design capability. That has to be nurtured and built. If I remember, in the DRDO presentation I did say that in building a capability, the design engineer takes up to 15 years. Building a capability as a chief designer takes up to 20 years. So these technology intensive works, up to some level, have been accomplished partly in the HAL in certain areas and partly in the DRDO laboratories in certain areas. For example, we have relatively done better in avionics; we have done better in lending gear system. On engines, there were two divisions working. One was on smaller engines, in the HAL Engine Design Bureau and the other was on the gas turbine. There was only one gas turbine research establishment of DRDO in Bangalore, which had been working, which had steadily taken up the power levels. At a point when the LCA programme started, there was thinking that their experimental engine would be converted into a potential engine for Kaveri. Kaveri as of today, has developed certain capability close to 80 to 85 per cent of what we need ultimately for fitment in an LCA aircraft.
They took 15 years to reach 85 per cent from the design stretch to a level where four to five engines are simultaneously under test. If you come to Bangalore, we can show you that.
Now, going from the 85 per cent to 97 per cent in all aircraft engines, the final thrust or the push is the most difficult area. It needs certain advance technology relating to blade, cooling and also vibration-free. It needs different materials and processed engineering.