Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
SpArK
GE404 For LCA MK1
GE414 For LCA MK2
Kaveri- Snecma For AMCA
So GE414 and snecma???? LCA gonna fly with 3 engine varians like GE404, GE414 and Kaveri-Snecma????
atleast this deal should have been done on time.. why so late ?
'The Tejas Story' is not an easy read - Books - Book Reviews - ibnlive
This is a three year old book - but I got my hands on it quite recently. So please pardon the delay, if you're already familiar with the title. Personally, I was fascinated simply because it's about India's very own Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) project. Today, it goes by the name Tejas.
It's not an easy read. It's a very slim volume but took me a week to complete. Mainly because there's so much technical detail. Abbreviation after abbreviation on page after page - so by the time you reach the middle of the book, you're flipping back to check what the earlier abbreviations really stood for. Somehow, I got the feeling the book could have been simplified a lot.
It's an account of the plane's development project through one man's eyes. Air Marshal Rajkumar was head of the plane's flight test programme for over nine years, from 1994 to 2003.
His team of pilots took the plane into the air, when no one was sure it wouldn't crash right back. When it was a bundle of nuts and bolts, made by a country that hadn't even designed an automobile on its own, much less a fighter plane.
So yes, his department was vital, crucial, to the success of the plane. But leafing through the pages I was first surprised, then hugely disappointed that there's very little mention of Dr Kota Harinarayan, the man who designed the plane and spearheaded the project.
For a book about a machine so iconic, so crucial to India's future success in military avionics, I'd have expected it to give me a bird's eye view, the entire history of the project. "The Tejas Story" doesn't do that. It's the story through Rajkumar's eyes. About how he and his team contributed to the project, not about how everyone built the plane together, with blood, sweat and tears.
Nevertheless, the book is still a treasure trove of data. For folks like us, whose only experience of flight is city hopping on a jumbo jet, it's an eye opener into the myriad tools and procedures that go into making a plane what it is.
The number of companies that collaborate on a new project. The number of people in whose hands the life of a pilot rests. The amount of bureaucracy and layers of authority all permissions have to go through. The unimaginable number of years it takes to get a new plane of the ground (The LCA project was first conceived in 1974, yet it first flew only in 2001!)
You learn about pitch and yaw, about flight dynamics that make a plane fly the way it does. About decisions that seem inordinately simple but which completely alter the design of a plane and the amount of money, research and time it needs to fly.
You learn about politics - how Lockheed Martin kicked out our engineers and shut down access to the flight software we'd built for the Tejas, as soon as the US announced sanctions against India for the Pokhran nuclear tests.
There's also the drama, the incomprehensible tension. Apparently, during the first flight of the very first prototype of the Tejas, control rooms on the ground received highly abnormal signals seconds after the plane took off.
The pilot insisted his craft was ok and managed a picture perfect landing. Later, they found that a local software technology park in Bangalore was broadcasting commercial signals on the very frequency that the LCA's sensors used to talk to the control room. An innocent mistake perhaps, but one that almost doomed India's most ambitious military programme.
There's also mention about ego clashes, organisational differences. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited or HAL, the country's main aircraft development agency, had serious differences with the Aeronautical Development Agency or ADA, that was specially set up to design the Light combat aircraft.
"The problem was the attitude of the corporate management of HAL. Under Chairman RN Sharma, the LCA programme was given step-motherly treatment. Till he retired (in 1997), things did not change," the book says.
Another setback for the programme was when the government gave the go ahead for developing an Intermediate Jet Trainer (IJT). The same group of 100 odd people working on the LCA project had to work for the IJT also. There was a division of labour.
Inspite of all these setbacks the Light Combat Aircraft or the Tejas as it is now called, has taken to the air. The world now knows India can make a cutting edge fighter plane. Read this book, to get a taste of how complicated, how uncertain the journey was.
Don't read it for the writing. A professional editor would probably have raised its quality by many notches. But read it for the adventure, for a peek into a world most of us never see.
Title: The Tejas Story; Author: Philip Rajkumar; Publisher: Manohar Publishers And Distributors; Price: Rs 525