Why do yu bother if somone loves or hate Tejas? as you have so much love for it !!!.
Good summary you have on LCA, no doubt LCA would be very good and matches all the design parametrs set out, but most of the critical component being imported--- negating all the reason for building your own jet.
This still would have been great, had it come in early 2000 around Su 30 induction time.
Just what they call a slang man, Tejas isn’t the bird I’m after.
It would have been even better if we would have had it in the 90's, however Indian economy was going under, it was only after the reforms that our foreign currency reserves permitted us to spend money on defense equipment.
I was born around the same time the project was initiated.
The project was to have a jet that would be really cheap(only way to do that is internal production) and jet fielded in massive numbers, Defense export part came into the media in 97-2000, however it will be very important to bring down the cost of the project.
Indian defense industry has seen a major change in the last decade, through a project like BrahMos the advantages of joint production were realized and carried forward to the long range BARAK naval SAM (India and Israel contributing 400-450 million $), MR-SAM (land based - Again India and Israel contributing 2.5 billion $), multi-role IL-214 aircraft ($ 300 million joint development).
India has also learned about an almost-legal way of acquiring defense technology the prime example being, Green pine radar from Israel where the arrow missile.
As a result India currently has defense agreements signed with Russia, Israel, and the USA which specifically state “an active involvement in combined development and production of weapon systems”.
The best part about joint production like the “Eurofighter” is that resources of two or more nations are involved in designing, manufacturing and marketing the products, the problem part is that all the nations involved might have some nations they might not prefer to sell the weapon to.
This is of special interest to HAL Tejas, as the very problems that chased the project were.
- A relatively inexperienced team (radar, engine, missiles).
- Lack of funds (India is not in the worlds developed nations list).
- Arms and related technology embargo, especially from the USA (the 10 year defense cooperation deal will ease things a lot).
- Internal bickering between Aeronautical Development Agency, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, and the Indian Air Force.
Now all of these problems have been solved and the latest quoted figure by HAL is 450 million dollars for 20 Tejas LCA which will put it at 22.5 million a piece, not that bad however it might be a step to get the air force interested, the defense organizations and Indian military seem to be on different page.
However even HAL has shown something, going ahead with a project and improving it as you go along, instead of investing long amount of time in updating project parameters, this experience will be invaluable in designing a similar 5th generation MCA, when ever it starts.