Ronin
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India’s Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Program will complete 20 year of the first roll out of the Technology demonstrator (TD-1) aircraft this year which happened on 7th November 1995 in the presence of then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.
While the first flight of TD1 was supposed to take place in the second half of 1996, The second Technology Demonstrator (TD2) was scheduled to follow nine months later in January 1997. Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao in his speech in roll out ceremony had said that warplane would be inducted into the air force by the year 2003 two years before the scheduled date of 2005.
Many in the audience were seen rolling their eyes hearing PM’s statement of early inductions of airplane then scheduled. While TD-1 flew for the first time on 4th January 2001, almost 5 years later than scheduled first flight, many key people associated with the program knew aircraft was far from ready for the scheduled first flight in 1996 as declared by PM in his speech.
Air Marshal Philip Rajkumar (Retd) who worked on the project for nine years from 1994 to 2003 was in charge of the flight test program which is a crucial phase in the development of any aircraft and in his book The ” Tejas Story: The Light Combat Aircraft Project ” had predicted based on amount of work still to be done on aircraft’s fly-by-wire system and US sanctions after Pokhran-II that first flight was possible only in early 2000 .
Above Cartoon drawn by Mohit Jayal which was published on December 1995 shows how Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Program even in its early days had more critics than supporters. Adverse commentary was a norm in newspapers those days and Critics blamed two factors which they thought was ridiculous, one was sophistication planned for aircraft which they though was too demanding and second was ambitious claims of capability to produce high technology needed for aircraft in-house was termed to ambitious.
Simple logic.
