Stealth fighters: India and Russia form groundbreaking partnership

[Bang Galore]

Stealth fighters: India and Russia form groundbreaking partnership but US rival tries to muscle in

High profile stealth aircraft: one of the names used by the Russians is Pak-FA - but India is likely to press for a different name

Fighter pilots who train alongside the their peers in the Indian Air Force (IAF) are left in little doubt of their tactical pedigree.

Indian pilots are among the best in the world, with lightning-sharp reactions and the deft hand-eye co-ordination essential to notch up “kills” in aerial exercises.

However, western counterparts say their instincts are still moulded by Soviet-style training manuals based on mass formations to dominate European airspace dating from the cold war, when the two were close, rather than the freer flight of smaller missions over the Himalayas.

The influence of Russia, which is still India’s largest arms supplier, is unlikely to wane soon.

Forming the bedrock of India’s air strike capabilities are Sukhoi-30MKI and MiG-21 fighter jets. And the country’s military planners are now banking on an Indo-Russian stealth fighter joining their ranks within a decade to match the capabilities of China’s J-20 fighter.

While two European rivals, the Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault’s Rafale, scrap over supplying fourth-generation combat aircraft to India in a contract that India says could be worth as much as $20bn, Moscow has already secured a partnership with India in military aviation lasting well into the future.

The prize of a visit by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, to New Delhi last year was an agreement to develop jointly a fifth-generation stealth fighter, called by the Russians the T50 or Pak-FA – although India prefers to call it the FGFA, for fifth generation fighter aircraft. The two sides agreed to build up to 300 over 10 years in a deal estimated to be worth $35bn.

The T50, the equivalent of the US F-35, is expected to join the Russian air force in operational trials in five years, and India’s four years later.

So far, prototypes of the T50 have completed 100 test flights. The aircraft has a range of 2,000km and a cruising speed of Mach 1.8. It will cost less than $100m – far cheaper than US rivals such as the F-22 Raptor and the F-35, according to its Russian makers Sukhoi and United Aircraft Corporation.

Indian participation puts Asia’s third-largest economy at the forefront of military aircraft design and upholds a longstanding Russian promise to share the most advanced technology – something the US has not been ready to do.

Mikhail Pogosyan, president of UAC, says: “We are not simply offering our Indian colleagues the best prototypes of our aviation technology as a finished product, we are dedicated to sharing engineering resources in the development of the most modern aviation facilities with high potential for the global market.

“The joint programmes in the area of combat and transport aviation are a launching pad to develop civil aircraft.”

Bangalore-based Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), which already assembles MiG, Sukhoi and BAE Systems Hawk jets, has sought at least a 25 per cent share in the production of a two-seat version of the aircraft. The fighter would also be equipped with BrahMos cruise missiles, which have been developed and tested jointly by the two countries. Ashok Nayak, a former chairman of HAL, describes the project as “more daunting” than any of the initiatives India’s aeronautics industry has embarked on in the indigenous development of aircraft such as the Teja, Kiran or Marut.

At a stroke, the agreement has given India the kind of technological partnership – to match its space programme – it craves, and the promise of defence exports.

Potential customers for an Indo-Russian stealth fighter include Algeria, Brazil, Venezuela, Vietnam and Egypt. Indonesia and Iran are also possibilities.

But the US may still fight back on the current tender to supply fourth-generation fighters to India.

The Pentagon recently told the US Congress that it was prepared to provide information to India about the F-35 Lightning II, produced by Lockheed Martin and viewed as a heavy, cheaper version of the F-22.

European defence companies have expressed concern that the US authorities might try to short-circuit the bidding process with a new, more attractive offer outside the terms of the competition.

Ajay Shukla, the defence correspondent for India’s Business Standard newspaper, has urged the Ministry of Defence in Delhi to abandon the purchase of “overpriced” fourth-generation fighters and immediately leap to the stealth capabilities offered by the F-35 in a single-vendor contract.

“Lockheed Martin has signalled in multiple ways it would supply the fighter at a fly-away cost of $65m per aircraft with deliveries beginning by 2015,” he says.

But other Indian defence analysts say the process to choose the medium multi-role combat aircraft is too far advanced for a U-turn, and current needs are too pressing.

A sudden departure from the process would dent India’s credibility, they say, at a time when the conduct of its bureaucracy is under greater scrutiny after a number of corruption scandals.

One defence expert says that the US offer of stealth technology puts the T50 partnership at risk.

The expert, who is close to the negotiations for fourth-generation fighters, asks: “What would India want with two stealth fighters?”

Stealth fighters: India and Russia form groundbreaking partnership but US rival tries to muscle in - FT.com

 

[Paan Singh]

f-35 offer was to break mmrca not pak-fa..

you can offer us few raptor too..we may offer you other mmrca

 

[KS]

Ajay Shukla, the defence correspondent for India’s Business Standard newspaper, has urged the Ministry of Defence in Delhi to abandon the purchase of “overpriced” fourth-generation fighters and immediately leap to the stealth capabilities offered by the F-35 in a single-vendor contract.

“Lockheed Martin has signalled in multiple ways it would supply the fighter at a fly-away cost of $65m per aircraft with deliveries beginning by 2015,” he says.

I dont know who is the bigger fool...Ajay Shukhla who says the flyaway cost of a F-freakin-35 is $ 65 million or the author of this article who found it credible enough to publish it..

High profile stealth aircraft: one of the names used by the Russians is Pak-FA - but India is likely to press for a different name

Garuda.

 

[angeldemon_007]

I think we should wait and see how this JSF program progress. We already have two 5th gen fighter jets planned fgfa and AMCA. I think we should wait and if by 2020 any of the two projects fgfa and amca gets delayed we can always go for F35 and may be by 2020 US might even be willing to sell f22.

 

[danger007]

If we go for F-35 it will be three 5gen fighters.. AMCA,FGFA, F-35 in future...

 

[angeldemon_007]

^^^
actually there is no problem in that unless its more expensive and technically hard to maintain 3 5th gen fighter jets.

 

[Zabaniyah]

India should consider the F-35 for its navy. Best to leave options open.

And $65 million/F-35? Sounds like a marketing stunt

^^^
actually there is no problem in that unless its more expensive and technically hard to maintain 3 5th gen fighter jets.

It's best not to operate too many varieties in my opinion.

 

[illuminatidinesh]

Ajay Shukla keeps talking of F35 I wonder where was he when US offered us only F18 and f16 earlier....

 

[OrionHunter]

I dont know who is the bigger fool...Ajay Shukhla who says the flyaway cost of a F-freakin-35 is $ 65 million or the author of this article who found it credible enough to publish it..

Spot on! In February 2011, the Pentagon put a price of $207.6 million for each of the 32 aircraft to be acquired in FY2012, rising to $304.15 million ($9,732.8/32) if its share of RDT&E spending is included.

Some private analysts, such as Richard Aboulafia, of the Teal Group state that the whole F-35 program is becoming a money pit. In 2011 The Economist warned that the F-35 was in danger of slipping into a "death spiral" where increasing per aircraft costs would lead to cuts in number of aircraft ordered which would lead to further cost increases and further order cuts.

Not only that, the bugs are too many. As of February 2011, the main flaws with the aircraft are engine "screech", transonic wing roll-off and display flaws in the helmet mounted display which experts say would take another 3 years at least to iron out!

So WTF is Ajay Shukla talking about? Does he now still want to hang on to a project that's in the throes of a death spiral? Even thinking of the F-35 is a bad idea.

 

[Zabaniyah]

Spot on! In February 2011, the Pentagon put a price of $207.6 million for each of the 32 aircraft to be acquired in FY2012, rising to $304.15 million ($9,732.8/32) if its share of RDT&E spending is included.

Hillary did offer you guys at $65 million. I don't know, it would only include the airframe and engines. The avionics and others may have to be gotten from somewhere else like Israel, or India develop it itself from the FGFA program, and possibly some technological know-how from the EFT and Rafale.
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2011/08/report-hillary-clinton-makes-u.html

I don't know, it sounds more like a marketing stunt with Hillary being a salesperson politician

Some private analysts, such as Richard Aboulafia, of the Teal Group state that the whole F-35 program is becoming a money pit. In 2011 The Economist warned that the F-35 was in danger of slipping into a "death spiral" where increasing per aircraft costs would lead to cuts in number of aircraft ordered which would lead to further cost increases and further order cuts.

Wow! You are quoting from The Economist?

 

[LiberalAtheist]

Stealth fighters: India and Russia form groundbreaking partnership but US rival tries to muscle in

High profile stealth aircraft: one of the names used by the Russians is Pak-FA - but India is likely to press for a different name

Fighter pilots who train alongside the their peers in the Indian Air Force (IAF) are left in little doubt of their tactical pedigree.

Indian pilots are among the best in the world, with lightning-sharp reactions and the deft hand-eye co-ordination essential to notch up “kills” in aerial exercises.

However, western counterparts say their instincts are still moulded by Soviet-style training manuals based on mass formations to dominate European airspace dating from the cold war, when the two were close, rather than the freer flight of smaller missions over the Himalayas.

The influence of Russia, which is still India’s largest arms supplier, is unlikely to wane soon.

Forming the bedrock of India’s air strike capabilities are Sukhoi-30MKI and MiG-21 fighter jets. And the country’s military planners are now banking on an Indo-Russian stealth fighter joining their ranks within a decade to match the capabilities of China’s J-20 fighter.

While two European rivals, the Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault’s Rafale, scrap over supplying fourth-generation combat aircraft to India in a contract that India says could be worth as much as $20bn, Moscow has already secured a partnership with India in military aviation lasting well into the future.

The prize of a visit by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, to New Delhi last year was an agreement to develop jointly a fifth-generation stealth fighter, called by the Russians the T50 or Pak-FA – although India prefers to call it the FGFA, for fifth generation fighter aircraft. The two sides agreed to build up to 300 over 10 years in a deal estimated to be worth $35bn.

The T50, the equivalent of the US F-35, is expected to join the Russian air force in operational trials in five years, and India’s four years later.

So far, prototypes of the T50 have completed 100 test flights. The aircraft has a range of 2,000km and a cruising speed of Mach 1.8. It will cost less than $100m – far cheaper than US rivals such as the F-22 Raptor and the F-35, according to its Russian makers Sukhoi and United Aircraft Corporation.

Indian participation puts Asia’s third-largest economy at the forefront of military aircraft design and upholds a longstanding Russian promise to share the most advanced technology – something the US has not been ready to do.

Mikhail Pogosyan, president of UAC, says: “We are not simply offering our Indian colleagues the best prototypes of our aviation technology as a finished product, we are dedicated to sharing engineering resources in the development of the most modern aviation facilities with high potential for the global market.

“The joint programmes in the area of combat and transport aviation are a launching pad to develop civil aircraft.”

Bangalore-based Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), which already assembles MiG, Sukhoi and BAE Systems Hawk jets, has sought at least a 25 per cent share in the production of a two-seat version of the aircraft. The fighter would also be equipped with BrahMos cruise missiles, which have been developed and tested jointly by the two countries. Ashok Nayak, a former chairman of HAL, describes the project as “more daunting” than any of the initiatives India’s aeronautics industry has embarked on in the indigenous development of aircraft such as the Teja, Kiran or Marut.

At a stroke, the agreement has given India the kind of technological partnership – to match its space programme – it craves, and the promise of defence exports.

Potential customers for an Indo-Russian stealth fighter include Algeria, Brazil, Venezuela, Vietnam and Egypt. Indonesia and Iran are also possibilities.

But the US may still fight back on the current tender to supply fourth-generation fighters to India.

The Pentagon recently told the US Congress that it was prepared to provide information to India about the F-35 Lightning II, produced by Lockheed Martin and viewed as a heavy, cheaper version of the F-22.

European defence companies have expressed concern that the US authorities might try to short-circuit the bidding process with a new, more attractive offer outside the terms of the competition.

Ajay Shukla, the defence correspondent for India’s Business Standard newspaper, has urged the Ministry of Defence in Delhi to abandon the purchase of “overpriced” fourth-generation fighters and immediately leap to the stealth capabilities offered by the F-35 in a single-vendor contract.

“Lockheed Martin has signalled in multiple ways it would supply the fighter at a fly-away cost of $65m per aircraft with deliveries beginning by 2015,” he says.

But other Indian defence analysts say the process to choose the medium multi-role combat aircraft is too far advanced for a U-turn, and current needs are too pressing.

A sudden departure from the process would dent India’s credibility, they say, at a time when the conduct of its bureaucracy is under greater scrutiny after a number of corruption scandals.

One defence expert says that the US offer of stealth technology puts the T50 partnership at risk.

The expert, who is close to the negotiations for fourth-generation fighters, asks: “What would India want with two stealth fighters?”

Stealth fighters: India and Russia form groundbreaking partnership but US rival tries to muscle in - FT.com

the Russians are practically giving us there most advanced technology and are willing to transfer it to us whereas America is offering us a watered down version of fighter for a fairy tale price of 65 usd per unit which is just crazy to say the least. why go for Excalibur locked in its sheath when Russia will hand it to us?

@ bold part i am not surprised IAF pilots have shown there skills in several aerial exercises with foreign forces

By Dawn's Early Light: Losing a Battle to Win a War

 

[tvsram1992]

the Russians are practically giving us there most advanced technology and are willing to transfer it to us whereas America is offering us a watered down version of fighter for a fairy tale price of 65 usd per unit which is just crazy to say the least. why go for Excalibur locked in its sheath when Russia will hand it to us?

@ bold part i am not surprised IAF pilots have shown there skills in several aerial exercises with foreign forces

By Dawn's Early Light: Losing a Battle to Win a War

including real battles

 

[blackjack]

Hillary did offer you guys at $65 million. I don't know, it would only include the airframe and engines. The avionics and others may have to be gotten from somewhere else like Israel, or India develop it itself from the FGFA program, and possibly some technological know-how from the EFT and Rafale.
REPORT: Hillary Clinton makes "unbelievable" F-35 pitch to India - The DEW Line

I don't know, it sounds more like a marketing stunt with Hillary being a salesperson politician

Yup.Looks like 65million was only for airframe and engines. Couple them with Avionics, Armaments, Self defence suites, life cycle cost and it will definitely shoot up 2-3 times that amount.

 

[SpArK]

Why is US peddling a hangar queen?


Nov 10, 2011

A multi-role combat aircraft is one of those things air forces the world over love for no good reason other than the desire to fly a plane that can do everything. Some 30 years ago, when the Indian Air Force selected the Jaguar as an MRCA (Multi-Role Combat Aircraft) when plainly it was only a low level short range strike plane, I had pointed out that the trouble with aircraft designed for multiple missions is that they cannot perform any particular role very well. Nothing has changed, except now “medium range” is added to the Air Staff Quality Requirements, two planes have been shortlisted, and the US is trying to scramble the competition by offering the Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) F-35 Lightning-II just as the bids by Dassault Avions for its Rafale fighter and by the European consortium EADS for its Typhoon warplane were being opened. This offer, while sudden, was not entirely unexpected, and has a whiff of the spoiler even though there’s a more substantive reason behind it. In any event, if aircraft quality and performance is what matters, scrutinising the JSF makes sense.



JSF can, at best, be considered a work in progress, and at worst an enormously expensive failure, that has already racked up 89 per cent cost-over-run and time delays of several years, with no end in sight to major design and technology problems confronting it. Winslow Wheeler, a combat aviation expert formerly with the US’ government accountability office (GAO) and ex-staff adviser to several US senators, deems this aircraft “a bad idea that shows every sign of turning into a disaster as big as the F-111 fiasco of the 1960s.”



The serious nature of F-35’s troubles is not a secret. According to news reports, the Pentagon’s director of operational test & evaluation earlier this year pointed to a raft of problems afflicting the JSF, among them, the “transonic wing roll-off (and) greater than expected sideslip during medium angle of attack testing”, unreliability of the components, the after-burner on the Pratt & Whitney F-135 engine disrupting the air flow causing severe vibrations and preventing realisation of maximum power, helmet-mounted display that has restricted testing to the preliminary Block 0.5 and Block 1 mission systems software, and the inability of the on-board inert gas generation system to obviate the buildup of oxygen in fuel tank that can result in fire and explosion. A news story additionally revealed significant structural weakness in the “forward root rib” providing “core strength of the wings”, and a recent GAO report referred to the faulty manufacturing of the outer mould of the aircraft that has undermined its stealth characteristics, rectifying which, it said, has major cost and time impacts.



JSF, it turns out, is an over-weight (49,500 pounds at takeoff in air-to-air role), under-powered (with an engine rated at 42,000 pounds of thrust) aircraft with a relatively small wing span (460 square feet), rendering it, in Wheeler’s words, “appallingly unmaneuverable” and in the same league as the short-lived F-105. Worse, it has only two tons of ordnance carrying capacity in its internal bays; loading additional bombs and weapons on outer wing stations will light up the aircraft like a Christmas tree on enemy radar, making nonsense of its vaunted stealth qualities. And in ground support mission, it is seen as a “non-starter” — “too fast to independently identify targets, too fragile to withstand ground fire”, and too lacking in payload capacity, including fuel, to pull useful loiter time over battlefield. The crux of the problem, according to Wheeler, is that the JSF “has mortgaged its success on a hypothetical vision of ultra long-range (air-to-air) radar… that has fallen on its face many times in real war”, eventuating in performance that is “embarrassing in the air-to-air role” even when compared to “elderly” aircraft such as the A-10.




But that’s not the half of it! The F-35, when it enters service, will be the least test-proven of any new aircraft. In this regard, the GAO report mentions that “Open air testing (is) constrained by range limitations that are incapable of providing realistic testing of many key (Block 3 systems software-driven) capabilities” that are available, but mostly on paper. What this means, according to Wheeler, is that 97 per cent of “flight testing (is) still unflown” and eventually only 17 per cent of JSF’s flight characteristics will be physically tested and proven. Dismayed as much by the sub-standard aircraft in the offing and the escalating costs as by the unwillingness of the US to share “critical technologies”, many of the Nato partners have reduced their requirement of this aircraft. Britain, for instance, has cut back to 40 F-35s from its initial order of 138 aircraft, and Israel, which contracted for 20 JSFs, is seeking refurbished F-16s and F-18s instead, as a near and middle-term solution.



The F-35 has been pushed into a virtual death spiral also by the seemingly insurmountable difficulties facing its vertical take-off variant, compelling the Royal Navy to junk it, a decision the US Navy and the US Marines are expected to soon follow. Costly attempts to rectify design flaws and to meet performance criteria amidst slashed domestic and foreign sales have raised the programme expenditure to the one-trillion-dollar level and the unit price of this platform to a “catastrophically high” $200 million, leading the US Congress to threaten a cut-off in funding.



It is the imperative to save the JSF programme that has prompted Washington to offer this plane to IAF. Delhi has to decide which combat aircraft industry — American, French or European, it will play the white knight to. Lockheed will flourish even if India rejects the F-35. But failure to sell Rafale or the Eurofighter will respectively put the survival of future combat aircraft development and production in France at risk and severely dent the prospects of EADS.


With so much at stake and the urge to recover some of the costs, France and the consortium of European countries will be prepared to give far more in return and by way of offsets to get a deal done.


The writer is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

 

[Varad]

India Russia friends forever.