India To Recieve Third Set Of Six C-130J Hercules Aircraft

[sancho]

The damn planes are Far too Expensive.

When will IA stop taking the public money for granted and focus on spending that 2 Billion $ in helping India develop a reasonable logistics aircraft.

When is Indian aerospace industry paying back for the money spend on LCA, IJT, Saras, DRDO AWACS and UAVs? The lack of money is only an excuse for many that don't want to blame the scientists. The fact however is, that we still lack far behind in many areas and can't even provide barely modern defence equipment to the forces.
Apart from that, RTA 70 is not aimed at the forces anyway, but is developed as a civil passenger aircraft for the regional airlines. A military role is only speculated by the media, but is not going to happen, since nearly all Indian forces will have similar class aircrafts by then anyway, not to mention that MTA is still some years away.
The C130J-30s are procured for special operations mainly and that's why features are added that won't be needed by MTA and in normal transport roles. That alone makes it more expensive, but will also limit it's numbers, while MTA will complement it later in normal transport roles and in higher numbers.

 

[Manvantaratruti]

When is Indian aerospace industry paying back for the money spend on LCA, IJT, Saras, DRDO AWACS and UAVs? The lack of money is only an excuse for many that don't want to blame the scientists. The fact however is, that we still lack far behind in many areas and can't even provide barely modern defence equipment to the forces.
Apart from that, RTA 70 is not aimed at the forces anyway, but is developed as a civil passenger aircraft for the regional airlines. A military role is only speculated by the media, but is not going to happen, since nearly all Indian forces will have similar class aircrafts by then anyway, not to mention that MTA is still some years away.
The C130J-30s are procured for special operations mainly and that's why features are added that won't be needed by MTA and in normal transport roles. That alone makes it more expensive, but will also limit it's numbers, while MTA will complement it later in normal transport roles and in higher numbers.

Total nonsense.

Scientists come and go. Projects, programs and researcher is forever. Building up a technical base in India and developing the Aerospace industry in India is priceless. Till date we have purchased more than 100 billion $ worth of Aircraft but have spent only 2-5 billion $ in our Aerospace Industry.

Total money spent on the LCA INCLUDING building ALL SORTS OF INFRASTRUCTURE is only 1.2 billion $ !!!

If India spends 1.5 billion $, we can come up with a pretty decent transport aircraft. Hell spend 2 billion $ but for god sake build Indian and Buy Indian.

It is only children who indulge in 'Blame the scientist' or "blame game" in general. Grown up's have better things to do that look for people to blame.

 

[Iggy]

One of the other thing is that the cost of the deal is also less than that of the first order.. I mean from 1.1 billion to 1 billion?? Usually, it goes up right??

 

[sancho]

Building up a technical base in India and developing the Aerospace industry in India is priceless.

True, but that doesn't mean you have to develop everything in India, like we tried in LCA and which is the main reason why it suffered so much. We would be far ahead with our technical base today, if we had de-linked the LCA and the Kaveri projects from the start!
So instead of further complicating projects that helps us to improve our technical base, we should look on how to ease them!
We co-develop MTA, the Russians had offered a civil version too, so we can easily take it as the base for an RTA, by modifing the fuselage and internal layouts, if nexessary also by adding turboprop engines to it.
That's exactly what NAL/HAL aim on RTA too, just that they want to develop a whole new aircraft for it, which takes more development time, is costlier and can't benefit from common techs and parts, to reduce costs.
Same could be done on basis of the Avro replacement, where MoD struggles to find privat partners, since they thing the order is too small. But what if NAL would take the Avro replacement winner as the base to develop a civil version (same cockpit, same avionics, same engines...)? The number easily could be doubled, the operational costs would be far lower than for a newly developed RTA 70.

That's why our industry has to look for more common goals with our forces and not only to look at their own goals, just like they have to look on how to ease developments, not to make them more complicated as needed.
But first they need to prove their own worth by deliverying the projects started years ago and not only that they can dream a lot about new projects.