The dream of every Indian aircraft designer — of building a globally sought after aircraft — is now https://www.eptfemembrane.net being realised. It has been a long time coming, almost two decades after the country decided to design and build an indigenous fighter aircraft. A few other countries sent their senior defence officials, ostensibly to persuade us to abandon the design programme: "Too hard and too difficult to build good aircraft", they argued. Our responsibility now is to provide the defence services with a large numbers of aircraft in adequate time. Foreign countries jealously guarded their technical capabilities and refused to share these with others.
The lack of a programme was demoralising and this prevented the building up of cooperative research and development projects. But we persevered. All these technologies were subject to embargos and denials by Western nations. We invited and took on deputation over hundreds of professionals from Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and many scientists and engineers from DRDO and Council of Scientific & Industrial Research laboratories.For the design, our engineers chose a compound tailless delta configuration, different from other aircraft of this class. Thus, the LCA programme not only enabled design and development competence in ADA, but also setup the National Flight Test Centre to test the aircraft’s flight performance. Dr Kota Harinarayana was the programme director and chief designer of LCA programme.
In the early ’80s, the country’s political leadership realised the importance of an indigenous aircraft to replace the ageing MiG fleet. In fact, at one stage, the United States prevented our acquiring even normal electronic components in reaction to the Pokhran tests. If we have to believe the rumour mills of the air show, a few countries have shown interest in acquiring our Tejas for their fleet. We also chose advanced carbon composite material for most of the airframe and airwings that made the aircraft light with minimal radar image. They were also not confident of India’s capability of building an aircraft. Our design and development capability must be converted into highly competent and state-of-the-art manufacturing. After the HF-24 Marut, there were no indigenous design efforts to speak of. Newspaper articles were also plenty, criticising ADA’s reckless ambition with little competence and track record. This was during the Cold War.

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