Abingdonboy
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I always thought our first AESA equipped aircraft will be Rafale but surprise!! Anyway Tejas mk1A will join the party too. Best thing about EL-2052 is that It comes in many variants and can be fitted to different kind of aircrafts...small or medium!!!
As it stands the MKIs will likely be the last fleet of fighters to get AESA radars (ignoreing the upgraded M2Ks and MiG-29s); Rafale, Jag and LCA will all have AESA well before the MKIs.I thought that super Sukhois would be the first to get aesa radars, I was wrong.
Congratulations to the IAF for this momentous occasion.
the airframe so old, why bother upgrading? why not get an entirely new jet and totally writeoff the jaguar?
1) Some of the newest Jag airframes have less than 15 years of life on them and can be "zeroed" by HAL during the DARIN III upgrade
2) Only the 60 newest Jags will be upgraded to DARIN III with the AESA radars, rest will be phased out in the next 5-6 years
3) The Jags are still an excellent DPSA and when upgraded to DARIN III will offer exceptional performance against enemy AD, infrastructre and armoured columns- no point devouting assets like the MKI and Rafale to such tasks.
4) The Jags remain the only a/c so far the IAF has integrated with the devestating CBU-105
The Jag fleet will utterly decimate on the Western front and will be potent at least for another 15 years.
I suppose that is for LCA Mark 2.
I'm not sure but owing to size limitations, there never was any plan to fit Indian AESA radar on LCA Mark 1.
@Abingdonboy
There's no reason the latest batches of the MK.1A won't be able to use the UTTAM (it will be ready around 2023-4) and will be tested on the Mk.1 ( starting in the next year), the Uttam has been designed to fit on the LCA from the outset so there is no technical issue there. It is all a question of timing really- Mk.1A will be in production from 2019-20 but Uttam won't be ready by then so a foreign AESA radar will have to come for the first few batches of the Mk.1A (likely the EL/M-2052).
Mk.2 can come with Uttam (and Kaveri ) from day one.