The great Indian duel
Ajai Shukla / New Delhi August 15, 2009, 0:11 IST
Six fighter aircraft are facing off in the world's toughest testing ground.
Over the last weeks, two Indian air force aces have busied themselves with what might well be the world’s most expensive video game: sitting at a simulator in the US and learning to fly one of the world’s most advanced fighters, Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet. Trained on the simulator, they were strapped into the real thing, gunning the twin F-414 turbofan engines to hurtle into the sky at speeds touching 2000 kmph.
Through the coming fortnight, those pilots will test-fly the Super Hornet in India, scrutinising every aspect of its performance to decide whether it meets the air force’s requirements for a medium multi-role combat aircraft to defend Indian skies, and support Indian ground troops, over the next four decades. There are six contenders for this massive Indian tender for 126 medium fighters, an order worth some $11 billion dollars. Besides Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet, Lockheed Martin has offered the F-16IN Super Viper; there’s the MiG-35 from Russia’s RAC MiG; the Rafale, offered by French company Dassault; the Gripen NG from Sweden’s Saab; and the
Eurofighter Typhoon offered by a four-nation European consortium.
Over the next eight months, four pilots will fly and fire all six fighters to evaluate which of them meet the stringent requirements spelt out in the air force tender. This duel has been in the making for eight years — that’s how long it has taken the defence ministry to frame its requirements, issue a global tender, and do a paper evaluation of the six responses that were received. Now, finally, the ball is in the air force’s court, to see how the aircraft perform in the air. Being tested first, over the next two months, will be the two American fighters and the Russian MiG-35. Then, after a five-month winter hiatus, the three European aircraft will be put through their paces.
The air force has assembled a team of its hottest top guns for evaluating the six fighters in the fray. Overseeing the entire testing process will be Air Commodore Rakesh Dhir, principal director, Air Staff Requirements at air headquarters in New Delhi. He will have two separate teams to do the actual flight-testing, the first of which will evaluate the two US fighters and the Russian aircraft, while the other will test the three European fighters in three types of terrain: humid Bangalore, the desert heat of Jaisalmer, and the freezing high altitude desert of Ladakh. Any failure could signal the end of a campaign that will set back each of the contenders around $25-30 million.
Two Boeing F/A-18 will land this weekend at Bangalore, the home of India’s secretive flight testing agency, the Aircraft and Systems Testing Establishment. Like Boeing, each company plans to bring in at least two fighters, in case any one faces technical problems. Accompanying the fighters will be fully equipped maintenance teams to iron out niggles daily, after the Indian test pilots finish throwing the fighters around the sky.
After the testing in Bangalore, each team will travel for two days to Jaisalmer to test aircraft performance in the desert heat. During the Jaisalmer leg, each contender will also drop unguided bombs at a ground target placed in the Pokhran range. But the really high-tech weaponry — guided by radar, infrared or laser — will be tested in each aircraft’s home base. Switching on airborne radar is a strict no-no when there is the remotest possibility of it being recorded by a foreign country. An aircraft’s radar signal is as unique to it as a fingerprint is to an individual. Every major air force, India’s included, maintains a worldwide “library” of radar signals; aircraft in those libraries can be identified whenever they switch on their radar.
But the sting has been taken out of the desert trials; the summer is practically over. Months of defence ministry inactivity, caused by the general elections, has resulted in “hot weather” trials being scheduled in a balmy 35-40 degrees Centigrade, rather than the searing 50 degree heat of a real Jaisalmer summer. Officials from Eurofighter, which sailed through summer trials in the Saudi Arabian desert, grumble that the ministry lost an opportunity to discover the contenders’ vulnerabilities.
From Jaisalmer, the fighters will head for the trickiest part of the trials, to Ladakh. On the face of it, there isn’t much to do at Leh airport: each fighter must land with a specified load of weapons and fuel, switch off its engines and systems, the pilot must alight and do a quick visual check of his aircraft, during which the cold starts to seep into the aircraft components. Then he must start up the fighter’s engines and systems, without external help, and take off. Sounds simple, but this is the phase that is giving the contenders nightmares. At 10,682 feet, oxygen levels are so low that there is real danger of the aircraft engines not starting up after they are switched off. And, once started, the oxygen-starved engines will strain to lift the fighters off that short airfield, even with a reduced payload that would be child’s play at sea level.
A specially selected air force test pilot of the rank of group captain will head each of the two test teams. Flying in tandem with him will be another junior pilot; it will quickly become clear whether the fighter can be handled comfortably by a less experienced pilot. Each team will include a clutch of technicians: an avionics system engineer to check the on-board electronic warfare equipment; a flight test engineer for performance related issues; a maintenance engineer to observe each fighter before and after each sortie. Making up the rest of each eight-10 person team will be a logistician to evaluate how easily the spare parts and consumables can be kept flowing; technicians from Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, where the fighter will eventually be built, and officials from certification and quality assurance agencies.
It will be a keenly watched duel not just in India but across the world — it isn’t everyday that a $11 billion tender comes your way.
A problem of plenty
TThe defence ministry rulebook that governs purchases reduces the medium fighter competition to three simple steps. Firstly, the air force specifies exactly the performance it wants from its proposed medium fighter. Next, it flies and evaluates all the aircraft on offer to see which ones meet all those requirements. Finally, the ministry orders the cheapest of those that qualify.
The most challenging of these steps is the first. Each detail of a fighter’s performance — the runway length it must take off in, its rate of climb, turning radius, maximum and minimum speeds, range of operation, weapons payload, radar pickup, and dozens of similar parameters — must be painstakingly quantified. Once those are down, step two becomes easy: the test pilots fly each aircraft, checking the parameters to see whether they match up to those that are laid down.
If there’s a hitch in the competition, it’s a problem of plenty. If aircraft companies are to be believed, there’s a good possibility that all six aircraft might qualify. That would make the price the final determinant. The cheapest aircraft — with costs calculated over its entire life of 30-40 years — will walk away with the order.
This situation has arisen because the air force has — to use an automobile analogy — set out to buy a Maruti-type car, but invited Rolls Royce, Jaguar, BMW and Audi to the bidding, along with Maruti and Hyundai. Four of the fighters in the fray (F/A-18, MiG-35, Eurofighter and Rafale) are expensive, two-engine powerhouses in the 25-30 tonne range. The other two (F-16IN and Gripen) are single-engine aircraft and, therefore, lighter (15-20 tonnes) and cheaper. And since avionics, sensors, radars and missiles are compact and light, the single-engine fighters are almost as combat-capable as their bigger rivals.
Experts agree that if the ministry plays by the rules, the Swedish Gripen — the lightest and apparently cheapest contender — will walk away with the contract. The single-engine F-16IN may be very close behind. The superior range and weapons payload of the heavier fighters will earn them no brownie points.
But the vendors fielding the twin-engine behemoths are confident of their chances. Admitting that their purchase price may be higher, they say that when the cost of ownership is calculated over 30-40 years, their lower maintenance and spare parts costs, and higher aircraft availability, will tilt the economics in their favour. And Eurofighter chief Bernhard Gerwert told Business Standard in Delhi last week that superlative flying and combat performance would definitely count. “The feedback we have got after meetings in Delhi with the ministry and the air force is that they will test more than just compliance with the tender,” he said. “The air force will take into account the performance excellence of each aircraft.”
The air force refutes this. Says a senior officer, “We don’t compare the aircraft with each other, we compare them with the tender requirements, filling in a compliance matrix.”
Amidst this uncertainty, and with billions at stake, the aerospace corporations have launched a media blitz to harness public and political opinion. Journalists, astronauts, corporate honchos, medal-winning athletes and politicians have been taken up for high-profile joyrides. NDTV anchor Vishnu Som has flown co-pilot on four of the six aircraft, more than any of the air force test pilots will be able to claim. The game is on.
The great Indian duel
