So that means you agree that LCA is useless if we decide to send it on bombing missions inside enemy air space...Means I am Tiger but only in my house...If I go out I am a common man...to challenge LCA enemy will have to enter our air space which our Flankers, Rafales and air defenses will make very difficult for enemy and after that Tejas will jump if somehow enemy manages to come inside....means you agree that its out of the capacity of LCA to do the initial dirty operation on enemies and LCA is not qualified for this...BTW F-16 is good at doing dirty work in the beginning....
I don't know you are a die hard fan of WWF. You want each and every individual fighters of the opposing force to jump into the ring like in WWF one on one or like those duels in old western films?
A prithvi missile has a range of 300 km. Agni variants have ranges varying from 300 to 5000 km. SO you call prithvi useless?
Do you know how many forward air defence bases that the IAF has? And which fighter will be more suitable to be place d there?
Every plane will have to operate within it's range only.What is the point of contention in it?
How can you expect a 6 ton empty weight plane to go deep into enemy territory?
For your information a lot of precious enemy air defense assets and targets will be located within the Tejas range and tejas will be used against those assets in war . SO it will fly into combat theater.
In the same way longer range fighters will attack assets located deep within the enemy territory. So what is wrong in having TEJAS which can do the same job in forward areas as capably as those long range fighters?
A significant number of targets during war time will be well within the Tejas 's range and all heavies of opposing forces will have to take on Tejas if they come inside indian air space. So Tejas will ahve as much fighting to do as the imported stuff.
Where do you think moving columns of armor will be engaging in combat? On the border or deep inside the enemy territory?If they are on the border , tejas will be employed in ground strikes against them . And during those times it will have to face enemy air defences and enemy fighters as well.
LCA alone and that too against 1000s of PAF and PLAAF combined (with likes of Vipers, J-10,J-11s, MKKs) attack while our bigger fighters are out on bombing?? hmm very bad idea in my honest opinion.....we will need to keep some heavy fighters along with them for home defense....
You want India to go bust financially by buying 1000s of high end foreign fighters which incidentally will give the same capacity as the much cheaper LCA with in the borders of the country?
That is always appreciated....I have full respect for our scientists for what they have achieved...Nukes, Missiles, Space program....LCA is good effort but still its too early to comment on its capabilities against the things like F-16 especially 52 and plus versions....
you can take some time out to appreciate the decades long effort of indigenous capability that IAF will have with Tejas as well. And how tejas brings great flexibility to IAf allowing it to use those heavy imported fighters in the long range roles intended for them.
Chinese do not have a choice...they do not have access to top of the line western stuff and Russia many times supplied them down graded stuff...I never said they are equal to LM, Boeing....and we are certainly not even as good as Chengdu....
So if people does not have choice like the chinese , they will build stealth fighters,
While great nation like India which has all the choices will be sucking up the foreign defence majors forever ,
even when there exists a technical capability to design a medium fighter like LCA Tejas that can do the job pretty favourably within the forward areas, where more than 50 percent of combat missions are going to be flown?
Please do not tell what M2K was not having initially....it flew in 70s and it was also a talk of the town in those days...current M2K flying with France, UAE have everything that requires in true 4th generation fighters...even our M2K will have those after upgrades....so it was the M2K then and it is the M2K today...thing is we decided to make fighter in the class of Mirage in 83 and today in 2013 we are yet to see it in the service so pleas stop comparing it with even M2K...
So if fighters age they will simply graduate to 4.5th gen as per your theory . AM I right? Are their airframes organic and evolve like human beings? Then why are you not ready to grant the same evolution for Tejas as well?
Only avionics and missiles can be upgraded, The upgraded Mirage still has the lower TWR than TEJAs and higher RCS than Tejas. Do you know that or not?
SO if IAF thought that these upgraded mirages are good enough so that they can buy 126 of them even in 2005, then why are people pouring scorn over mk-2 which will bring much higher combat capacity than Mirage in the form of lower RCs and higher TWR, within it's unrefuelled range?
I googled and just came to know it is yet pass FOC