Defense

As part of Exercise Shakti-2019, French troops arrived in India on October 26 for training with their Indian counterparts. The bilateral training exercise will be conducted at Foreign Training Node at Mahajan Field Firing Ranges, Rajasthan. The bilateral exercise will be conducted from October 31 to November 13.

NEW DELHI: With the IAF now fully backing the indigenous development of a fifth-generation fighter aircraft (FGFA), it’s all systems go for the desi stealth jet. The defence establishment plans to seek the Cabinet Committee on Security’s approval for the detailed design and prototype development of the advanced medium combat aircraft (AMCA) by early next year.
The twin-engine AMCA will basically combine advanced stealth, supercruise (the capability to achieve supersonic cruise speeds without the use of afterburners), super-manoeuverability, data fusion and multi-sensor integration with AESA (active electronically scanned array) radars.

Development of a FGFA is an extremely complex and costly affair, with the American F/A-22 Raptors and F-35 Lightning-II Joint Strike Fighters being the only fully-operational ones around the globe at present. “Both the Chinese J-20 and the Russian Sukhoi PAK-FA do not have the requisite super-cruise and stealth capabilities,” said a senior IAF officer.

DRDO, in turn, rejects widespread concern the developmental saga of the “swing-role” AMCA may go the same way as the long-delayed Tejas light combat aircraft. “The design work on AMCA began in 2009. By 2014-2015, the fighter’s configuration, in tune with IAF requirements, had been worked out. But the problem was that there was no engine,” said a scientist.
Consequently, the decision has now been taken to go in for two squadrons of AMCA Mark-I with the “available” General Electric-414 afterburning turbofan engine in the 98 Kilonewton thrust class.

“The next five to six squadrons of AMCA Mark-II will have a more powerful 110 Kilonewton engine, which will be developed indigenously with foreign collaboration parallelly. The supercruise of Mark-I will be slightly limited due to the older engine but it will be upgraded in Mark-II,” said a source.
After the Rs 400 crore design sanction for AMCA in December 2018, it will now take “another seven to eight months” for the nod for the prototype development phase at a cost of around Rs 7,000-8,000 crore, which will be required over a decade, said sources.
As per existing plans, the 25-tonne AMCA’s “roll-out from the hangar to the runway” will take place by 2024-2025, with the first test-flight a year after that. “By 2029, the clearance to begin production of AMCA Mark-I should come. Mark-II production, in turn, should begin by 2035,” said the source.
DRDO says the advanced technologies to make AMCA a stealth fighter range from “serpentine air-intake” and an internal weapon bay (internal carriage of smart weapons) to radar absorbing materials and conformal antennae. “Most of the designing for stealth shaping of AMCA has already been done,” he said.

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The plan is to produce the single-engine Tejas in greater numbers, with the IAF already committed to acquiring 123 of them. Another 200 Tejas Mark-II, with more powerful engines and advanced avionics, will be inducted at a later stage.
“The first test-flight of Tejas Mark-II or the MWF (medium weight fighter) should take place by 2023. The specialised AMCA, which will cost double the Tejas Mark-II, will be inducted in smaller numbers … stealth aircraft are expensive,” said the source.

The exercises with the two countries will be conducted in a tri-service format (involving their armies, navies and air forces) — for the first time with the US and the second with Russia. The first India-US tri-services military exercise named Tiger Triumph will be held in November off India’s east coast, while the Indra drills with the Russians will be staged off the west coast in December, said one of the officials cited above.

According to reports, the helicopter crashed at an altitude of 11,500 feet at the Kedarnath helipad, just short of the Kedarnath shrine, a few days back. With transporting the wreckage to a lower region being next to impossible due to only foot track connectivity to Kedarnath, the company, through the state civil administration, requested the IAF to help it evacuate the crashed helicopter before the closure of the shrine at month-end.

For the Indian Navy, access to French southern Indian Ocean territories would mean longer deployment missions in regions where visible flag-waving is seen as crucial to counter growing Chinese naval presence. Earlier this month, Indian Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu had visited Comoros – following in the steps of President Ram Nath Kovind’s trip to Madagascar last year.

The signing of the RLSA is on the anvil, high-level defence sources said; India and the United States had signed the LEMOA or Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement three years ago. Both sides are working to ensure that the agreement, to be signed by Rajnath Singh and his Russian counterpart, General Sergey Shoygu, is ready for signing in the next ten days.

Scientists from NTRO recently visited Kibithu, the eastern most sector of the LAC, ET has learnt. The army informed them about the need for mobile network. While the scientists agreed to raise the matter at the government’s highest level, they said that only mobile towers or microwave towers that need only small power supplies and project network can be setup along the border.

Designed by the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), the new FTR is a 10,000 tonne ship, 200 metres long and 60 metres wide, equipped with state-of-the art electro-optical missile tracking (EOTS), S-band radar tracking and telemetry devices apart from a launch pad, a launch control and mission control centre.

Fish Tail-I and II are in the easternmost corner of Arunachal Pradesh. Fish Tail -I is largely glaciated terrain, and patrols from either side are few and far between. The proposal for “coordinated patrolling” was made by India at a high-level meeting between the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and the Indian army in June in the run-up to the informal summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Mamallapuram,Tamil Nadu, earlier this month.