8 aircraft per annum has been planned and in 2018-2019 a delivery of elevenwas indicated with FOC aircraft to follow. From past experience, any figure given really does not matter until we see the aircraft at the bases which appears unlikely. The current statistics show one delivery every four months which is a considerable improvement since 2015 when the delivery was one every 10 months and a “standard deviation” i.e. one sigma on that figure of 6 months indicating a process badly out of control. We may be out of the woods but we will know for sure by end 2019. Deliveries will remain erratic.
Since the ‘90s, delays in the programme required upgrading aircraft such as the MiG-21, Jaguar, MiG-29 and the Mirage 2000 at various times. This has cost an arithmetic sum of Rs 19,000 crores or a PDV of Rs. 80,000 crores. The current move to acquire some 21 mothballed MiG-29s is an indication of the urgency of maintaining squadron strength as well affording some interim relief.
Two contracts for 40 (series) production aircraft were placed in 2006 and 2010 buta total of 12hadbeen delivered at the moment of writing. What we may get in 2019-2020 will become clearer by December 2019.
The rest of the report castigates the MoD, the ADA and HAL but ofcourse that is water off the duck’s back as many such reports past have shown. Nevertheless those are being summarised below.
• Project is still “in progress”
• ADA took decisions that lacked scientific basis. Coming from “bumptious” Parliamentarians it is a compliment to their common sense and an indication of the trouble. This is strong stuff, (but is unfortunately true).
• Testing towards full opening of the flight envelope for FOC remains incomplete. Testing is risky rather than difficult. One got the impression that perhaps the EADS collaboration was as much to have someone to take the responsibility should something go wrong during the tests “He (only!)told us to do it, Sir!”-rather than lack of actual know how.
• Agencies monitoring the project were casual leading, to a 30 year delay. Formation of a core monitoring teamwas suggested and it seems to have had some effect.
• ADA has failed, after 3 decades, to produce an aircraft which fulfils the IAFs requirements.
• The Committee is appalled at the casualness of some of the replies by Ministry officials.
• The Committee desires that the Ministry identify and fix responsibility upon MoD/DRDO/ADA officials who failed to ensure involvement of IAF personnel in the initial years of the development.(The scope of this has to be expanded).
• The committee feels that 35% indigenisation has been achieved but the MoDofficials maintain that 70% has been achieved because the rest cannot be achieved anyway!(It is an indication of a “different” mindset. This needs review).
• HAL, ADA and the MoD have failed miserably and are to be rebuked for functioning so. (Unfortunately we can do little about the then Political Leadership and the Establishment for its failure to take timely action, despite ample warnings).
The theories of failure
It is as difficult to spin out a development programm eover the 36 years as it is to complete it in five. Indeed it would need more organisation to achieve a spin on such a prolonged development.The following are some possible hypotheses:
The conspiracy theory:is it that there was never any serious intention that the project was to succeed. The project was sanctioned because, given India’s capability, the country could not but have such a fighter project, so it was ensured by various means that it did not progress at any useful rate.For supporters of this theory the circumstantial evidence is firstly that it does not take more than ten years to develop and IOC a new fighter and despite early evidence of non performance, the project was not foreclosed and a new start made. There is also the fact that several practical proposals based on the HF-24 e.g. ASA/HSS/HF-73/ HF-25 /GAF etc requiring about 60-65 crores at that time, were not sanctioned and yet an organisation that was yet to be foundedwas sanctioned Rs.565 crores to develop an urgently wanted replacement for the MiG-21.Here is the catch :that embryonic organisation (ADA) had to rely on the “ignored” organisation (HAL) to deliver the goods.This arrangement has failed wherever it has been used e.g. the UK’s aero industry in the 1960s on the English Electric /Vickers for the TSR2 and Fairey /Westland for the Rotodyne. Oversight ordeliberate?
The project delays are nothing unusual because that is the way the Government does things. The second Howrah Bridge, which affected the daily lives of sixteen million people, was sanctioned in 1971 and completed only in 1989. Amongst the reasons for the delay was that the stayed cable bridge technology had to be imported because it was a requirement that ships of a certain size had to pass beneath it. It was possibly quite clear at that time that after building the Farakkah Barrage the river Hooghly would be unfit for any shipping. Certainly no ship of the stated size(10,000 tons), has come upriver in the past thirty years and it would be abrave river portpilot who would even try. The Hooghly needed dredging even for barge traffic! I mention this because I feel any number of justifications can be found once there is a will to import.
Then there is the question of work culture. It was the Cambridge scientist JBS Haldane who had observed in the 1950s that little work got done because Indian scientists would spend much of their time at office discussing their personal problems, their horoscopes, their promotion prospects, putting down office rivals, general office politics while actual work got little priority.Understandably Haldane is not remembered with much fondness by our Scientists.The private sector engineers come from the same social stock but their companies would rapidly go bankrupt if they followed that work culture. It may be relevant to recall that when Dassault developed the Mirage IV Avionde Dissuasion (deterrent bomber-Anglo Saxon!) using the Mirage III as the basis (pl. note)his fifty engineers(pl. also note) did not have much of a social life for the two years (again pl. note well), they took to go from sanction to first flight. We took some eighteen.
It is also possible that having ignored the “lack of belief” (as in the report) and gone ahead with building of the two Technology Demonstrators, the ADA and Ministry leadership soon realised that they had blundered and the platform would have to be significantly redesigned. Such things sometime happens e.g the Supermarine Type 224/ Specn. F7/30, predecessor of the iconic Spitfire. The leadership lacked the knowledge and courage to grasp the nettle firmly possibly because of loss of face and prestige involved. The changes were understood but repeatedly postponed for the “next watch”.
There were genuine technical problems which the top men of ADA completely failed to see owing to lack of sufficient experience in the necessary area.
One can only conjectureas what actually went on in the labyrinths of Lutyensin the 1980s and 1990s though there has been mentionin the memoirs by the then VCAS, of various wildcat schemes by the Scientist –Bureaucrats of that time but if there were technical causes of delay, then the following notes may help in forming an idea.
First it is to be realised that the LCA’sconfiguration is the most difficult such to develop because changes are inevitable during development and the configuration does not allow for easyPlan Bs ? Indeed if a group of experienced aircraft engineers had been hired to recommend a configuration package that would be the most difficult to develop for the Indian Industry of the 1980s, they would recommend a plain delta with FBW and ahigh proportion of composites !Unfortunately by the end of the 1980s, ADA had unerringly zeroed onto precisely this configuration. As a footnote I would add that in 1983 India had four proven airframes with manufacturing information and considerable service experience but it is possible ADA chose not to be beholden to HAL for anything and therefore did not seek access to the information. Such organisationalbehaviour happens and needs intervention from higher direction.
It would be instructive to look at what other, experienced fourth generation designers were doing around that time. The repeated pattern was of limiting risks to the minimum whilst venturing forth.
General Dynamics was using the conventional tailed layout with blended body and LERX strakes and FBW first ensured they had good Plan Bs in case the FBW did not work. They also used less than 3% composites and indeed their structure was decidedly conservative- machined rather than chemically milled skins for the wings and traditional sheet and strip for the rest of the structure.Result : the world-beating F-16.
Mikoyan was even more conservative, used no composites on the prime structure, discarding even that( for the engine cowls) at the first sign of trouble and of course there was no FBW.They just stuck to refining the configuration which was both original and brilliant.Digressing, the MiG-29 is a very “flexible” configuration permitting considerable “change and chop”and reminds me of the Me-262 in the way it reduces the nacelle –body interference drag though with some additional wetted area drag. In a way they showed what could be done just by sticking to conventional engineering.We received the MiG-29 in India in the 1980s and if only someone had the wit to “see”!
The Dassault team based the Mirage 2000 on the Mirage III, used more composites but only for the wing skins. The fuselage which requires more sculpting, was aluminum. They had of course previous composite experience having tried it out on the Mirage III’s fin.
The Saab Gripen team had based configuration on the Viggen so they mainly focused on the FBW aspect and compositeswere kept again only for the wing skins. They too had previous composite experience, having used it on the Saab 105 rudder.
It is no coincidence that NONE of the four teams used composites on the fuselage.ADA went in for 65% composites without or perhaps because of nothaving sufficient experience on the material.
The reasons I have focused on the composite percentage is because if we analyse the delays, we see a continuous pattern of uncertainty about these. In 2015 the delivery period was about ten months and a sigma of 6 months meant a process badly out of control. It cannot be that senior officers are habitual liars. Indeed some of those who made the promises were respected men. Nor can it be that the production rate is 4 per annum per tool set.Boeing would need aplant the size of Texas to meet the 787’s demand.Even at the rate of three months per set, we should have produced some thirty two LCAs and not nine since the IOC.The construct therefore is as follows:
Once the prototypes are built, the development of an aircraft into a serviceable combat type shifts from engineering and science to art and intuitions and sometimes, almost “black magic”. Not every engineer has the required skills. An aircraft between its first flight and the IOC may need perhaps three hundred “mods”. It is here that composites play up. Their great strength- rigidity – is also their great handicap as far as our industry is concerned. Our industry is used to a “suit on assembly” culture. Aluminum is quite amenable to that though it does nothing for build quality. Unfortunately one cannot do that with composites. The tolerance required, 50 microns is half the general tolerance of machined parts. One cannot just mallet say the forward fuselage joint line with the centre section to blend. It is possible that the production rate of four every year mentioned is the probability of having acceptable parts per annum! The “out of control”-ness would affect both performance and aircraft to aircraft variations.
So we have a situation where a particularly ill informed choice of material used in a scale not heard of anywhere else made the prototyping difficult. The changes inevitable in aircraft development could not be made and tested nor was it possible to firmly commit that x number would be ready by Y date! Thus IOC and FOC dates would keep on sliding. Boeings, trouble in productionising composites will long be remembered.
Technical corrections
I have carefully studied the CAG report and as they say “read the tea leaves”. Having said that I reiterate that what I am saying is very probably very true.The CAG report confirms my long held “empirical” beliefs.
Judging by the items of shortfall in the report, the first conclusions is that all nomenclature issued by ADA and DRDO/Ministry (TD, PV, LSP, SP, IOC1, IOC2 etc) are just labels not worth the proverbial Tinker’s damn. What we have is a motley collection of prototypes of varying build standards. This is normal in aircraft development. What is not normal is that there is no certainty of when the next will be flown. This factor needs improvement because that is holding up development flying. The recently granted FOC has to be viewed against this background.
The LCA Mk.1 is unfit for service. The aircraft will not meet up on its payload range required for FOC. The superiority of the aircraft over the Combat Hawk regarding the MFDs,BVRs, FBWetcare all LTP (Lost Total Pointed) as in the childhood game of Bagatelle,because of the payload range shortcoming and the energy performance, as reflected in the report.
Thus, the LCA will continue to be kutccha (unripe, half baked) unless drastic corrective administrative action is taken. The modifications required by the LCA Mk1 include increasing length of the fuselage and re-contouring the fuselage as well as cranking the wing along with a careful weight improvement programme. About 40% of the airframe requires redesign.It is the delay incorporating the necessary changes which is the crisis. New readers may find the earlier discussion on the LCA in Vayu (V/2010 “Wisdom and Courage) ,Vayu I/2015 The LCA – Beloved Aircraft or Lemon?), Vayu I/2017 Falcon ,Griffen, Tejas and V/2018 The Riddle of the RFI,of some interest. Still, the situation is not irrecoverable. It has been the experience in product development that what is seen as a vast and insurmountable problem is in reality a bundle of simple problems all entangled with each other. What is needed is that the composite situation be impartially reviewed outside of the nexus of HAL/ADA/DRDO/Ministry/IITs and instead of relying on “It is just around the corner” promises made by stressed “retiring in six months” officials in some office in North Block, the people should walk the shop floor and talk to the poor devils who are trying to meet schedules on an unproven technology and also to see the trends of the rejection rates and rework rates.
Such investigations will indicate the need for significant redesign and a temporary retreat from composites (as the Russians quickly did with the MiG-29) should be considered. New tooling will be required as the fuselage which any way needs lengthening and re-contouring be redesigned in metal to get all the development “mods” done quickly before reverting to composites thereafter. This will delay the programme by about twenty months but the programme will now be on firmer grounds from the start. The main problem to this solution is the reluctance of the organisations to admit they have been wrong all along for 30+years !.
The administrative corrections
Are these various committees such as the PAC or the CAGs merely ceremonial and part of the “rites and rituals of a Republic”? Still, they seem to have put the finger on the problem even at the start – in this case in 1989- and yet like Cassandra, their warnings were ignored causing loss and harm to the nation and its Armed Forces.
Such committees must be given the counsel of super technical team so that some cross questioning could take place. It would certainly improve the quality of the answers !
The focus of the audits by this Committees should move from the financial and procedural irregularities to the Failure of Programme and Time Management. They could have contributed positively if they had been empowered for “armed Reccee” rather than “reccee” mode. The Committee should, like the Election Commission under TN Sheshan, use its power to veto or to recommend the stopping of or changing the management of projects that have significantly overshot their schedules.It is true that at the starting line,Genius and Folly look similar but the difference comes out quickly. Let the Babus and the Politicians restart them but at least the red flagging would be on record and it would reduce complacency about what the Chinese call “an iron rice bowl”. It is worth recalling that the Americans and the Soviets succeeded because the winner emerged from a Gladiatorial contest. Our “winners” are long anointed.The consequences arevery plain to see.
The Committee rightly wants the Officials who failed to ensure involvement of IAF personnel during the initial design stage, to be identified. Indeed the scope of this activity needs to be enlarged. Rather than a superficial identification of this SA or that PD, we have to identify what was the submerged mechanism which selected, sustained and protected such officials despite the lack of progress. What were the forces and the mechanisms which sanctioned FSED on a project that clearly was unsatisfactory to the customer? Why were new pioneering technologies left to be developed on platforms that were yet to fly. Overlooking this common sense decision is a big cause of all the delay.
Our counter espionage in the Weapons and Strategic Industries sector-Abwehr to use the convenient German word -needs to be strengthened because thereis circumstantial evidence that the delay in the Tejas programme may have been largely due to covert action. Serial blunders cannot account for thirty six years. In this connection the need to protect performers cannot be overstated. We have had several key leaders in our strategic programmes mysteriously dying. The case of the ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan is a warning. It is not enough he was exonerated, his potential contribution over the years has been irretrievably lost.
LCA(s) of the Future
There can be no abandoning of the LCA programme. Fighter specifications are as fickle as feminine fashion .Weapons Marketing being what it is, the Light Combat Aircraft –which had become passé after the 1980s, being replaced by 1:1 T/W ratio, AOA,the BVRs and then Stealt has the “to die for” USP features, will again be making a comeback once the order rate of the F-35 falls below a certain rate per annum and the world’s inventory of BVRs reaches saturation! Thanks to the prolonged delay, the LCA will be right on the recycled starting line its possible competitors being the LM T.50 and the Boeing BTX- 1. Further project studies of the LCA programme should be initiated using the Eurojet 2000/ M 88/ RD 93 engines and accessories,Europeans/Russian/French systems just to avoid being “Viggened’ as Saabexperienced when they tried to offer it for our DPSA. I am not being skittish. Fighter specs.go through fashion cycles. It has happened before with the T38/F-5/F-20. Indeed the entire package of Kaveri, MMRetc should be put as the phrase goes “under new Management” because there is going to be money for LCAsof the future.
Maintenance of pretensions is often an obstacle to making progress.The LCA Mk.1 is unlikely to have any worthwhile operational use. Like the Hunter F.Mk.1, it should be used for the development of systems.
The Mk.1A and the Mk.II must be given the status of new projects because that is what they are,particularly given the difficulties of configuration.As amatter of ample precaution there should be several second strings projects studies that should run until the LCA Mk.1A/Mk.II are stabilised. The IAF has excellent experience in upgrades and they should be given the task of exploring a “structural surgery” on a F.414/MiG-23/27 non VG hybrid. The fuselage size is just about right and many of the 53 concessions(armouring of the cockpit for example) would be easily rectified. At the present the study should be no more than just a “what if we do this” study and should be complete within 8 to 10 months and perhaps costing Rsone or two crores if that. There can be another 3 or 4 such explorations and the systems developed for the LCA should be repackaged in these “new” air frames much as Dassault and SAAB used existing air frames as proven basis for their new designs. The private sector must be asked for proposals even if it is to get the balance right.
Surprisingly the project most to benefit from the ills of the LCA prorgamme will be the AMCA. All this should be read into management of the AMCA programme which is at present going exactly the way the LCA went, so unfruitful and for so long.