ACM Bhadauria's staff officer, Air Vice Marshal N Tiwari, rebutted criticism that the Tejas LCA had taken too long to be developed. AVM Tewari said the first 4-5 years in the Tejas fighter's design and development cycle went into setting up testing and production facilities that are essential for aircraft development programmes. "Today, if we are ready to move forward in developing a next-generation fighter, it is because the Tejas programme gave us a core critical mass," said AVM Tiwari. AVM Tiwari, who has flown more than 200 sorties as a Tejas test pilot, said the LCA was ambitiously conceived as a technologically state-of-the-art fighter. Its unstable design, quadruplex flight control system, computerised utilities management system and an air frame made of composite materials make it contemporary even today, he said. An unstable design makes a fighter aircraft more manoeuvrable than one with a stable design, since stability tends to resist sharp manoeuvres. However, an unstable design requires a highly reliable flight computer to prevent the fighter from going into an unstoppable spin. "When I get feedback from the Tejas squadron today, the pilots are uniformly happy with the way the plane flies, and how well integrated it is for the pilot," said AVM Tiwari. "We have a fighter that incorporates the best of the Russian and the Western fighter design philosophies.
He gave the example of the autopilot, which, in Russian fighters, allows a disoriented pilot to return his fighter to level flight by simply pressing a 'level mode' button -- a facility that Western fighters, such as the Mirage 2000, do not have. This feature has been incorporated into the Tejas fighter
