ADA Tejas Mark-II/Medium Weight Fighter

[Rahul Singh]

looking at this i seriously doubt about capabilities of gripen and saab
saab seems rouge company look at fake figures company show off to public thank god we r not buying this crap 80kn thrust and 5ton payload lol bullshit:bs: even out tejas doesn't have such payload with 84kn engine

Gripen C: Empty weight 6.800 Kg + Internal fuel 2400 kg + 5300 kg payload = 14500 kgs (without weight of pilot and cannon ammo). Stated MTOW is 14,000 kg. So max possible payload at MTOW is > 4800 kg

Gripen C's 5300 Kg payload figure is put at a considerably reduced internal fuel load.

Meanwhile. Tejas Mk-1 actually has 89.8 Kn engine, the same amount of internal fuel as Gripen C and an MTOW of 13500kg.

Since ADA did not prepare fact sheets for PR unlike SAAB, it simply put a payload of 3500 kgs with maximum internal fuel. So the payload of Tejas should not be much behind than practical payload of Gripen C.

Maximum payload on Tejas stations. Total 5700kgs. In this case, there won't be any internal fuel.

 

[Suryavanshi]

Just by putting one more engine Mirage 4000 was first flown in 1979. And could enter into service only in 2001 in its much-refined avatar as Rafale. That's 22 years for an experienced player like Dassault.

So let the guy have his time. He will learn in due course.

TBH it would make much more sense if we design a whole new aircraft instead of fitting another engine in Tejas
And yes it might have taken 20 years to complete that process but this is not 1979 anymore we are living in 2018 it is possible to do the same in much less time I'll say 5 to 10 years if we are really determined

 

[Steven Rogers]

TBH it would make much more sense if we design a whole new aircraft instead of fitting another engine in Tejas
And yes it might have taken 20 years to complete that process but this is not 1979 anymore we are living in 2018 it is possible to do the same in much less time I'll say 5 to 10 years if we are really determined

It's been a decade and mk2 hasn't completed.

Sent from my Aqua Ace II using Tapatalk

 

[Suryavanshi]

It's been a decade and mk2 hasn't completed.

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U can blame the previous government for this I believe if there was no Modi in 2014 it would take another decade for Tejas FOC.

 

[Shaitan]

Mark 2 will be 20% heavier, will be dubbed MCA.

 

[Rahul Singh]

TBH it would make much more sense if we design a whole new aircraft instead of fitting another engine in Tejas
And yes it might have taken 20 years to complete that process but this is not 1979 anymore we are living in 2018 it is possible to do the same in much less time I'll say 5 to 10 years if we are really determined

If an engine is being added means a new aircraft is being designed. It is nothing short of it.

Besides today it is easier to design a new aircraft than previously because of computer aids e.g CFD but testing is getting even more challenging. Unlike those times today a single platform is supposed to fulfil sweeping roles. This by its nature is a time-consuming job wrt. to testing. Especially when you want to add features like swing role, carefree manoeuvring safeguards against pilot disorientation and a range of advanced autopilot modes.

Case in point is JF-17. This aircraft which does not even has a full spectrum FBW could be cleared into service much earlier than Tejas. In Tejas entire latter half of the test flights have been dedicated towards FCS optimization.

For instance in Tejas, every store/weapon mix has to be thoroughly tested. Data generated is then used to update the FCS. A pilot does not need to worry if it has a balanced mix or unbalanced mix. He just flies like always. But same is not the case with a JF-17 pilot. He has to have balanced store mix still he needs to remain aware of limits and danger such load mix presents wrt to departure from controlled flight.

 

[Si2d]

Yep. So simple. Lets do it tommorow itself, just add one more engine.

Developing a 4.5+ generation flanker like aircraft is definitely a requirement if we want to establish ourselves in aeronautical industry but that isn't easy to do.

It may be easy for people to say "lolz just add one more engine and flyz it" but hard to do on ground

Just by putting one more engine Mirage 4000 was first flown in 1979. And could enter into service only in 2001 in its much-refined avatar as Rafale. That's 22 years for an experienced player like Dassault.

So let the guy have his time. He will learn in due course.

You r right and it is easy too as ADA can put 2nd engine under central pylons which is for that unnecessary fuel tank . Genius

Are you getting serious? We were only having our time with a new guy.

Ohhh god....it feels like talking to children...when I said just put another engine, I didn't mean take fevicol and stick another in der...I thought ppl on this forum were mature enough to have normal conversation instead of me writing to explain to a noob....

I simply ment instead of trying to get more power from a single engine...i.e. if we increase mk2 weight...it will need even more powerful engine and air force again will start crying low acceleration...we need more power ...its an inherent issue with single engine fighters...thats y when soviet were designing fighters...they choose both heavy i.e. sukhoi & medium i.e. mig29 both to have twin engine...looking at the advantages....

All I ment was instead of wasting our energies into a single engine fighter we should put it all on a twin engine plane....Air force and HAL both have said that mk2 will be an all new plane...thats wht I ment...

but ohhh my god...u all just caught one end of the stick and ran with it...no one even try to read more that one line of what i wrote,,,y did I ever think that there will be a forum with mature informed educated people...all everyone did was try to make an obvious point..trying themselves to feel superior...and missing the actual point i was making...btw instead u could have just asked wht I ment with just add another engine...adult conversation ppl

n sure its not fare to blame the whole forum...but i feel everyone who responded must be either illiterate or an engineer......both have tendencies of missing the obvious...

 

[tsunami]

Gripen C: Empty weight 6.800 Kg + Internal fuel 2400 kg + 5300 kg payload = 14500 kgs (without weight of pilot and cannon ammo). Stated MTOW is 14,000 kg. So max possible payload at MTOW is > 4800 kg

Gripen C's 5300 Kg payload figure is put at a considerably reduced internal fuel load.

Meanwhile. Tejas Mk-1 actually has 89.8 Kn engine, the same amount of internal fuel as Gripen C and an MTOW of 13500kg.

Since ADA did not prepare fact sheets for PR unlike SAAB, it simply put a payload of 3500 kgs with maximum internal fuel. So the payload of Tejas should not be much behind than practical payload of Gripen C.

Maximum payload on Tejas stations. Total 5700kgs. In this case, there won't be any internal fuel.

It's dry thrust is just 54 Kn. Can it really go 14 tons max take off weight.
Tejas with the same thrust said to be just 13.5 tons.

 

[Steven Rogers]

Ohhh god....it feels like talking to children...when I said just put another engine, I didn't mean take fevicol and stick another in der...I thought ppl on this forum were mature enough to have normal conversation instead of me writing to explain to a noob....

I simply ment instead of trying to get more power from a single engine...i.e. if we increase mk2 weight...it will need even more powerful engine and air force again will start crying low acceleration...we need more power ...its an inherent issue with single engine fighters...thats y when soviet were designing fighters...they choose both heavy i.e. sukhoi & medium i.e. mig29 both to have twin engine...looking at the advantages....

All I ment was instead of wasting our energies into a single engine fighter we should put it all on a twin engine plane....Air force and HAL both have said that mk2 will be an all new plane...thats wht I ment...

but ohhh my god...u all just caught one end of the stick and ran with it...no one even try to read more that one line of what i wrote,,,y did I ever think that there will be a forum with mature informed educated people...all everyone did was try to make an obvious point..trying themselves to feel superior...and missing the actual point i was making...btw instead u could have just asked wht I ment with just add another engine...adult conversation ppl

n sure its not fare to blame the whole forum...but i feel everyone who responded must be either illiterate or an engineer......both have tendencies of missing the obvious...

If you had any idea about design and development, you haven't commented such, but anyways you look new learner to the basics.

Sent from my Aqua Ace II using Tapatalk

 

[rohit b3]

Ohhh god....it feels like talking to children...when I said just put another engine, I didn't mean take fevicol and stick another in der...I thought ppl on this forum were mature enough to have normal conversation instead of me writing to explain to a noob....

I simply ment instead of trying to get more power from a single engine...i.e. if we increase mk2 weight...it will need even more powerful engine and air force again will start crying low acceleration...we need more power ...its an inherent issue with single engine fighters...thats y when soviet were designing fighters...they choose both heavy i.e. sukhoi & medium i.e. mig29 both to have twin engine...looking at the advantages....

All I ment was instead of wasting our energies into a single engine fighter we should put it all on a twin engine plane....Air force and HAL both have said that mk2 will be an all new plane...thats wht I ment...

but ohhh my god...u all just caught one end of the stick and ran with it...no one even try to read more that one line of what i wrote,,,y did I ever think that there will be a forum with mature informed educated people...all everyone did was try to make an obvious point..trying themselves to feel superior...and missing the actual point i was making...btw instead u could have just asked wht I ment with just add another engine...adult conversation ppl

n sure its not fare to blame the whole forum...but i feel everyone who responded must be either illiterate or an engineer......both have tendencies of missing the obvious...

Sorry, haha.

I will try my best to explain.
Just a slight change in dimension of an engine could alter design so much that redesigning could take over 10 years. Tejas mk1's GE404 to the Tejas mk2's GE414 is an example itself.
"Adding another engine" would mean developing a completely new fighter, but based of the Tejas. MCA was such a concept in 2008, but later it was dropped in favor of the AMCA.

Further, making it into a Twin engine fighter would convert it into a 10 tons + Fighter(Empty) and thus defeating the whole concept of a Single Engine Light Combat Aircraft.
Twin Engine fighters are costlier to buy, costlier to maintain , requires more maintenance time and have low availability.

Imagine a War with China, after 2 months of intense war, the IAF is already going low on resources and has reduced fighter availability. Whats the use of a huge Su-30MKI which cannot fly that time?

Though Tejas's per hour flight cost is not known, but we know for the fact that a Single engine Gripen's per hour flight cost is 4700$ per hour , while a Twin engine Rafale's per hour flight cost is almost 4 times more at 16,500$ per hour.

To end it, ever wondered why the USAF has over 900 single engine F-16s, but only 500 twin engine F-15 ?
In wartime scenario, a Tejas cannot penetrate deep into Chinese territory by itself,owing to the lower range and payload, but I would trust the Tejas mk1A to take on any incoming J10A , Su-27 and most other fighters of the PLAAF, baring maybe the Su-35 and J-20.

 

[Rahul Singh]

It's dry thrust is just 54 Kn. Can it really go 14 tons max take off weight.
Tejas with the same thrust said to be just 13.5 tons.

MTOW matter only at take off. With less powerful engine an aircraft like Gripen can still take off by having a longer rolling distance. Once in the air, as the volume of fuel in internal tanks keeps reducing the aircraft continues to get lighter than its MTOW.

But if an aircraft tops its fuel load with a tanker up in the air and does not loose any of its payloads than it will again have problems wrt manoeuvring.

 

[rudresh]

Getting AMCA vanilla flavour i.e a stealthy air frame of AMCA,engines and avionics,radar,weapons etc similar to Tejas will be much much better than any thing else. Later we can add the extra bells.

 

[Sancho]

U can blame the previous government for this I believe if there was no Modi in 2014 it would take another decade for Tejas FOC.

You "believe", but more important should be what you "know"!

IOC was achieved in 2013, FOC planned for 2015. So the previous government was only in power for 1 year to deal with FOC, while the current government is in power for 4 years and we don't see any progress on that matter either.

More over, politicians are not developing LCA, scientists are. The failure of ADA to develop a nose, that works with the radar, was one of the problems that delayed FOC. ADA then had to look for an imported nose, which took time and delayed the FOC further. The integration of Python V reportedly has issues too, the gun is not fully integrated yet either...
all this are development delays, completely unrelated from politics or the forces, but it's easier to stick to "believes" and blame politicians or the forces, while ignoring the elephant in the room.

 

[Sancho]

Mark 2 will be 20% heavier, will be dubbed MCA.

Which should not be surprising, since it gets longer, wider and adds new internal systems. All that adds weight, just as we already see that the MK1A upgrades are adding weight too.

 

[Kshithij]

You "believe", but more important should be what you "know"!

IOC was achieved in 2013, FOC planned for 2015. So the previous government was only in power for 1 year to deal with FOC, while the current government is in power for 4 years and we don't see any progress on that matter either.

More over, politicians are not developing LCA, scientists are. The failure of ADA to develop a nose, that works with the radar, was one of the problems that delayed FOC. ADA then had to look for an imported nose, which took time and delayed the FOC further. The integration of Python V reportedly has issues too, the gun is not fully integrated yet either...
all this are development delays, completely unrelated from politics or the forces, but it's easier to stick to "believes" and blame politicians or the forces, while ignoring the elephant in the room.

Another nonsense. Scientists don't develop anything unless politicians facilitate that. Politics is about management of people and resources. Without proper management, nothing can be done.

Tejas IOC-1 was pretty horrible and half-baked. It had no engine, no radar, no weapons integration, no EW and practically had nothing in addition to what was there in 2008-9. I don't see why it was even called IOC. The same IOC could have been given earlier too. Fake branding won't make the actual process complete

 

[Sancho]

Another nonsense. Scientists don't develop anything unless politicians facilitate that.

Lol and don't we pride ourselves that HAL developed HTT 40 on their own, without government funding?

On the other side they failed to develop IJT, so we blame politics for IJT and praise HAL for HTT 40, the usual convinient way.

 

[Rahul Singh]

Another nonsense. Scientists don't develop anything unless politicians facilitate that. Politics is about management of people and resources. Without proper management, nothing can be done.

Of all those 35 years people count LCA took in development what they don't know is that first sum of money was only release in the period of 1991-93. And LCA was on its maiden flight in 2002 despite setbacks of Pokhran.

Without IAF committing enough numbers, the ADA-HAL was not taking the project any further. There is a requirement for extra flow of money for expediting a testing process specially one with many unknowns. Developers need to place orders for systems that cannot be locally sourced. Then there is long gestation period before those systems can be delivered. Also, third-party vendors require enough orders to break-even if they are asked to set up dedicated infrastructure. Nothing could be done without sufficient order in required numbers.

Here 20 IOC + 20 FOC was hardly any numbers for building a production line with a capacity of 16 aircraft per year at HAL let alone at third party places. And in reality, ADA-HAL only started expediting the development when then DM M Parikar cut the Gordian knot with MK-1A. Supposedly it was enough to at least reach break even. Since then things started to pace up. Today we are witnessing 1 Tejas out of production every month.

As for the technical challenges. Well, nothing unusual. Team Tejas was learning and building capability at the same developing a combat aircraft with cutting-edge technologies. It is nothing short of a miracle that they completed IOC phase without a single incident let alone an accident. SAAB with rich experience to draw from had crashed Gripen twice even when they were only using a customised F-16's FBW.

As for FOC delays. Let me put an example. When EF 2000 which entered service in 2003, attained FOC with RAF in only 2008. Similarly, Tejas which acquired IOC in 2013 should be getting FOC sometime in 2018-19.

 

[Suryavanshi]

You "believe", but more important should be what you "know"!

IOC was achieved in 2013, FOC planned for 2015. So the previous government was only in power for 1 year to deal with FOC, while the current government is in power for 4 years and we don't see any progress on that matter either.

More over, politicians are not developing LCA, scientists are. The failure of ADA to develop a nose, that works with the radar, was one of the problems that delayed FOC. ADA then had to look for an imported nose, which took time and delayed the FOC further. The integration of Python V reportedly has issues too, the gun is not fully integrated yet either...
all this are development delays, completely unrelated from politics or the forces, but it's easier to stick to "believes" and blame politicians or the forces, while ignoring the elephant in the room.

The Tejas didn't begin it's production yesterday now did it?
It took us 35 years for it to take shape regular delays and political bullshit were the cause.

 

[Rahul Singh]

The Tejas didn't begin it's production yesterday now did it?
It took us 35 years for it to take shape regular delays and political bullshit were the cause.

There was one time during the 90s when Suresh Kalmadi had threatened scientists with criminal cases for wasting nation resources on LCA. That's the kind of BS the team had once witnessed.

 

[Sancho]

The Tejas didn't begin it's production yesterday now did it?
It took us 35 years for it to take shape regular delays and political bullshit were the cause.

Wrong, many avoidable development mistakes and over ambition were prime reason of the "development" got delayed on many levels.
No politician forced ADA to design the world's smallest fighter or DRDO to develop the largest MBT. No politician is responsible for overweight and drag issuse of the design. No politician is responsible, for the delays of IOC and FOC as explained, since all that is part of the development of ADA.
What you can hold politicians accountable to, is the selection of ADA/DRDO as the leading agency, without taking foreign partners into account, or not properly setting up the infrastructure of the Indian aviation industry, but not for any development mistakes of the programme.
It sadly took that long and it still will take nearly a decade, till we might have a version that complies to the basic requirements and just as in the past, the MK2 will be dependent on not more delays in the programme.

Keep in mind, that we selected the engine years ago, but couldn't move on with MK2, because of the IOC/FOC delays. The same delays that then led to the MK1A compromise. So although the government supported the MK2 and pushed for engine and consultancy partners to improve the development, the slow pace of certifications and ongoing development issues, keep hurting Tejas.