Indian Air Force (IAF): News

Drones would be a great area for India to get in to... they are semi disposable so if they are not the best it wont matter too much, but they would benefit from being made in enormous numbers so making them domestically without filling them with Israeli and French and American and Russian stuff should mean they will be cheap enough to use in enormous numbers.

Licence produce a datalink system and a simple little jet engine... perhaps one designed for a cruise missile or something.... an design the weapons yourself...

It should be easier than developing Tejas.

And don't make it too stealthy... that is just a waste of time...

Oh my oh my, the plane zoo is making optimization?

It is not as good as it sounds unfortunately... the MiG-29UPG is essentially a MiG-29SMT version upgrade specific to India... there is no commonality or overlap with the MiG-29KR their Navy bought for carrier operations.

If they had made the MRCA programme a split purchase deal with say 36 Rafales and say 200 MiG-29M2s, it might have cost them 15 billion, but the MiGs would already be entering service now and it would mean they could retire all their current MiG-29UPGs, and replace some of their MiG-21s and MiG-27s and Jaguars because the MiG-29M2 is fully multirole and a brand new airframe.

It could eliminate the Jaguars and MiG-27s and some MiG-21s and all of the MiG-29UPGs from service and replace them with the one new mode MiG-29M2.

The MiG-35 uses exactly the same airframe so in terms of upgrades they can eventually upgrade them to MiG-35 if they want to go that way, or they could keep them cheap cost effective replacements for previous gen fighters and light strike/swing aircraft.

If they leg go of the French stuff they could have gone for a split purchase of MiG-35s and MiG-29M2s and kept the contract price to 10 billion... the MiG-35s might be a little delayed by they would get their 29M2s pretty quickly.

It would also take a lot of pressure off them so when they talk to the French about buying some Rafales they will be talking about options and choices and incentives from the French to convince them to buy them.. ie they wont be talking from a position of... we need some fighters to fill gaps and we need them really fast... and more importantly NOW... they can say... well Russia will pretty much let us buy anything we want from them, so we could join this Su-75 programme which we could use instead of Rafale, or if the MiG LMFS programme looks better suited to what we want then we could join that instead... so one would offer a follow on 5th gen fighter that will be related to the MiGs we just bought, so the Sukhoi offer would need to be amazing to get us to not look very seriously at MiGs 5th gen fighter proposal, but while we clearly realise the Rafale is a good aircraft... what follow on 5th gen fighter programme does it lead to, or is it just a dead end programme that will be replaced with drones?

Honestly, for short range attack missions, the MiG-35 will essentially carry all new Russian weapons including RVV-BD long range AAMs, so there would not be a lot of modification for a strike derivative... but I suspect their Su-30MKIs and whatever they get upgraded to would be more useful as strike platforms with both a decent range and payload (at the same time... which is what you don't get with smaller aircraft without lots of inflight refuelling aircraft...)

Spot on. Although the rafale are good I still feel it was a very expensive purchase and not inline with the rest of the IAF. India would be much better doing a joint project with Russia.

I agree.

With the Su-30MKI they added a lot of non Russian bits and at the time those choices were made it was a good choice because at that time the Russians still had fairly basic fighters in service and they would not have been able to make the Su-35 we see now as good as it is.

But time has moved on and Russian Avionics have moved forward in leaps and bounds and as shown in Syria and Ukraine that Russian EW and technology is much better than it was even 13 years ago during the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia.

These days the foreign and domestic components of the Su30MKI as well as the local production/assembly just contribute to making it much more expensive and really don't add any new capabilities or improve performance.

An Su-35 that Russia would sell to India (and probably no other country) is better than any Su-30MKI upgrade, and if India want a two seat model they are upgrading their own Su-30s to Su-35 standard anyway... they could have a mix of single and two seat planes if they want them.

What I am saying is that at the time the foreign bits were likely much better than the Russian alternatives if there were Russian alternatives to the bits they bought, but the price was that integration and especially price suffered... perhaps 20% of parts were foreign but 80% of the price was those 20% of parts.

Having a demanding customer forced them to be better... it was a good thing for Sukhoi too.

Maybe they join the new checkmate fighter program and India can easily put their own twist on their versions.

Well that could be a problem. This programme is being paid for by a country... speculated to be the UAE but might be another country... hell it might be Saudi Arabia and that is why it is being kept secret. The point is that a joint venture between Russia and India then India gets a say in the design but they have to pay for it. With a UAE programme India is not going to contribute more than the UAE so they might have to settle for paying for their own modification variant where the get the basic plane that UAE wants and they pay for changes... a bit like the Su-30 programme where they took an Su-30MK and India could choose what to change and the final product was an Indian aircraft and they could decide who could buy it if it was exported to a third country.

It all depends on how the Su-75 programme is structured... the whole programme might already be suitably funded and they just want final product customers to boost production numbers to keep the costs low because the UAE is not going to buy thousands of these aircraft, but if there is as much interest as there is from this forum they might get a dozen countries to buy this plane... for 20-30 million dollars an airframe you would probably be paying about the same money as you would buying a British Hawk lead in fighter trainer... and this is a 5th gen light fighter... countries that don't have a lot of money would be very interested... Argentina, Thailand, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, etc etc etc even North Korea and Cuba and Venezuela.... who would not want an F-35 that does what it is supposed to do for that price... even for double that price at 40-60 million dollars per aircraft... especially if it is MiG-21 level costs to operate.

That is what kept the MiG-21 in service... it was cheap and easy to keep in the air... and while it lacked range and payload very few things could run away from it...

The checkmate would be ideal replacement for mig-27, mig-21, jaguar. And I am sure HAL are now shitting it with Tejas program. Tejas 2 may never see the light of day now, checkmate is far better than Tejas 1&2 and cheaper than the latter, and we all know how long it takes India to produce aircraft.

To be fair 5th gen light fighters are not operational everywhere made by everyone... compared with the F-35 the Tejas is actually pretty good... I honestly like the idea of it and how they have designed it, but they are clearly not happy with a few things...

I also don't think they can really wait another 5 years for a replacement plane... I think a MiG-29M2 can be made now in Russia and in India... they are not stealth fighters but do they need to be as light strike aircraft... just have stealthy stand off weapons so the aircraft remain cheap to operate and affordable to buy in numbers. I would go with a stealth plane for the fighter interceptor role the MiG-21 performed but even then the MiGs could support such operations and carry extra missiles to boost their performance.

And a joint project with checkmate being built in India still ticks the box for made in India or at least the government will make it so.

It would be best for India I agree, but will the country that owns the design agree too. Is this programme opened up and made public because they want help in developing the plane or have the opened it up to make it public to get countries considering new planes to realise that this is on the way and so don't make any rash expensive purchases because if you can wait this is going to be worth a serious look.

There will be a few pilots and ex pilots in the administration thinking their country would be better off getting involved in this programme rather than waiting to see if they get old worn out F-16s or if they get F-35s rammed down their throats and how on earth they are going to shift around the military budget to pay the 120 million plus to buy them let alone the 80K euros per hour needed to operate them...

They say the new plane will be 6-7 times cheaper to operate per hour than the F-35, and a conservative estimate of operational costs for the F-35 would be about 68 thousand Euros.... and I am being generous. 7 time cheaper makes it just under 10 thousand Euros per flight hour which is reasonable, but the question is are Sukhoi using official costs for F-35 or actual costs, because if using official costs then it would be even cheaper...

And to be honest I feel it's the best option for India, a better, cheaper, more capable aircraft and production rate will be better. Strike version could be made also

A strike version would be unnecessary I think... for the strike role it would initially take internal weapons only on a SEAD or DEAD mission and then once air defence is seriously degraded then it will take internal and external weapons and start cleaning up...

If am honest India should have been looking at using the Tejas 1 as an advanced trainer. Continue to operate the Su-30, upgraded mig-29, joint production of checkmate, and purchases of su-34 and mig-35 as required. And 4-6 squadrons of su-57 ( India should have stuck it out with the joint venture), top it off with a mixture of mi-28, ka-52, mi-35, and their two homegrown attack helicopters and India would have a happy mixture of foreign purchases, joint production/built in India, and homegrown products.

I totally agree, but I also think we are far too biased to be fair judges. What we can say is that these systems were developed to work together and integrating them into an air force should not be that difficult. It is also very clear that Russia is happy to enter into joint ventures with India for things they want that Russia does not already make.

I understand India wanting to transition from buyer to developer and maker but I think they are going about it the wrong way... trying to make their own light and medium and heavy stealth aircraft is like trying to make their own main battle tank... there are not many countries on the planet that can do that sort of thing to end up with something that is world class that is not made up from bits from all over the place and is not eye wateringly expensive.

India is trying to make a heavy super tank when they should have been making their own T-72 or T-90 upgrade mass produced numbers tank and buy the best upgraded model from Russia as their more powerful but more expensive tank.

Same with the planes, they should have been building lead in fighter trainer aircraft and drones as their focus.

The fundamental problem is that even if they got the Arjun perfect and the Tejas perfect how many are they going to be buying... how many export customers are they going to have... and remember that would mean they would need a global support network that they would need to create to support their products in service...

The point is that what ever they make is going to have to be both capable and super cheap and produced in enormous numbers... so a lighter numbers tank, or drones... not super expensive tanks or fighter planes that have so many different foreign components that you need approval from 4 different countries to export it... and you know if those 4 countries include the US and France that many customers that might be interested wont get the choice because of sanctions which might stuff up the whole programme for domestic production too.

Seriously, I've been hearing about the MiG-29UPG plans since I joined you guys MP.net. India just strings Russia along for years and years.

It sounds ambiguous, but about 40-50 of their planes were already upgraded to the MiG-29UPG level, but that might have included parts and components from other countries/vendors. They also recently bought more MiGs in an emergency purchase of stuff from Russia after tension with China... it is a good way to bypass red tape like tenders and competitions that drag on for years.

What it is saying is that by 2022 all their MiGs in their Air Force will be to the same standard with the same avionics and systems, which is a good thing of course.

Every year there are grand announcements, memorandums of "intent" signed, playing games with Russia while rushing through deals with the Americans via fast tracking arrangements. India dangles money before the Russians and spends it by the yanks, yet it's always Russia who extends itself without conditionalities to help India. Time to get real.

Could turn taht around and ask how many American fighters do they operate? They have American transport and attack helicopters and transport planes, but no fighters or bombers, and in terms of fighters and strike aircraft, they have the Jaguar and Mirage 2000 and are getting 36 Rafales and pretty much all the rest are Russian except for Tejas.

It is all a bit chaotic, but the majority of their stuff is Russian or Soviet...

I think the point here is upgrading with russian equipment and armament, not Israeli, French, UK, ..., as usual. Most probably they decided for russian components basing on results of Russian MiG-29SMTR in Syria. Mix of foreign components didn't work well against Pakistan.

Yes, I think there was a bit of foreign stuff in the UTG upgrade and with the addition of new aircraft recently because of border disputes with China, they did get about 10-20 more MiGs so upgrading those too... having it completed by 2022 is next year....

Regarding the Rafale deals the last word I heard the French were talking about domestic production in India which I thought was out of character... perhaps they realised they over did the cost of 36 aircraft and want to ensure they have not priced themselves out of the market...

To justify local production they would need to want hundreds of planes.... otherwise it would be much cheaper to just buy the number you want made in France and then work out the difference in price they would have charged for local production and then just used that money to fund local production of something like a drone that might operate with the plane or operate independently.

Russia does not have any road map for the Mig 29.

Maybe that was the problem for the F-35... they had an awesome roadmap... but no airfields so the designers obviously realised this thing didn't have to fly and if it didn't get off the ground the pilot would not need a working oxygen system...

The so called road map for the MiG-29 was initially an upgrade to make all previous models multirole and that was the MiG-29SMT, while a more complete structural upgrade led to the MiG-29M2/KR/35, which are three different versions of the same new aircraft for low cost use with cheaper to buy, carrier based, and premium versions respectively. The next step was the from scratch new next generation stealthy fighter called the LMFS.... and it is a proven roadmap because it was taken by the Su-27 family too.

And Russian export material is in orders of magnitude inferior to domestic Russian hardware.

No it isn't. You effectively get what you pay for so the Su-30MKI when it was bought was the best Flanker in service anywhere. The Su-35 is better but it came after and benefited from Sukhois experience of making the Su-30MKI and the Su-30MKK for China.

Export items are degraded normally, but everyone does that, and you can pay for new stuff the Russians don't even have if you want to in which case you can have better stuff than the Russian military was prepared to pay for...

This new Su-75 is a good example... right now the Russian military has not ordered any so there is no domestic version.

So the countries purchasing Russian H/W has to procure several sensors, sub systems from other countries. Algeria, Indonesia, India etc all do the same.

No they don't... the Su-30MK works just fine with all Russian components and if the customer is happy with those then there is no need for any foreign parts... but most air forces have other aircraft in use so if they can put the same equipment in all of them then it makes sense to do so. Not many western companies would allow a customer to put Russian stuff on their planes, but Russian companies seem to be rather more flexible and accommodating.

Indian mig-29UPG is the most advanced mig-29.

No it isn't. It is a MiG-29SMT2 sort of plane, but lacks the new airframe design of the new MiGs.

The "most advanced Mig 29" doesn't even have an AESA radar.

Most advanced American fighter is cancelled and declared expensive rubbish... so they are going back to planes from the 1970s...

I wonder if the Su-75 would inspire the Americans to try to do the same with the F-22...

It can be 100% Russian provided Russia exports the same tech that goes on board their own aircraft.

Much of the networking stuff on a MiG-29M aircraft would be useless to any other air force, and there would be a lot of other stuff they would not need like the equipment on board to monitor and maintain temperatures in a nuclear weapons warhead while on a weapon pylon.

The Customer might just want different things on their aircraft to match the same things in other aircraft they already use or have used in the past.

But since export version of Russian tech is totally, completely mediocre, clients have to either import the same tech from a Western country or if possible design it in house.

But the airframe itself is export quality is that downgraded too? Why are western downgraded exported stuff so wonderful and Russian export downgraded stuff so awful?

I mean the nuclear powered submarines the Russians leased to the Indians must have been very expensive to take out all the secret stuff and replace it with unreliable primitive crap. The Su-30MKI was more advanced than any other Flanker the Russians had in service for quite a while.... India was paying for it so any components that were Russian would have been better than any fitted in Russian aircraft because Russian aircraft weren't getting upgrades at the time.

How many countries do you know of that purchases Western aircraft and then opts for third party hardware to integrate?

You have to be aware of who the vindictive are and who the good guys are. Russians are selling a product so if the customer wants extra cream or cheese or whatever then they will put that on... sometimes the customer makes their own cream or cheese or they get their cheese and cream from somewhere else so the Russians are nice guys and let them put their own extra fillings on.

On the other hand buying from France of the US... you take what you are offered, and if you buy from those Russians you better keep using our cheese and our cream or there will be problems for you... we can be very nasty arseholes when we choose to be... ask Gaddafi or Saddam or Osama Bin Laden... oh you can't?

At one stage they all worked for the west in different ways, but they made the wrong choice and got run over...

This is despite the fact that U.S, U.K, France exports hardware which is a degraded version of their domestic version.

Western companies make very good products and didn't have to go through three economic collapses in the 1990s and also didn't have to go through the break up of the Soviet Union which led to many of the Soviet Avionics suppliers to suddenly now be in Belarus and Ukraine, which meant not only a 20 year patch with no work and no income, but also trying to create new products from scratch.

I would say the level they have achieved so quickly in the MiG-35, Su-35 and Su-57 is astounding... but I must say western sanctions forced them in to it... they were otherwise happy working with european companies on that sort of thing... because their products were good if a little expensive for domestic use.

Even degraded Western military hardware that is exported is streets ahead of Russian military hardware that is exported.

If you said that when the Su-30MKI was being developed I would have agreed with you because you would be right, but now things have changed dramatically... the Russians now have Su-57 on the verge of being available for export and a new single engined cheaper light 5th gen fighter in a very advanced stage of being ready where you can sign up to get some of them too.... in comparison which European 5th gen fighters are ready for sale, and look at the situation for the only US light 5th gen fighter on the market.

It seems if you want a 5th gen fighter you go to China or Russia these days...

Small size means a small RCS. Will also be extremely agile during a dogfight.

The B-2 has a lower RCS than the F-22 or F-35...

The thing is that the problem for them is that no one is buying them so they don't produce them... so there is no experience beyond prototypes... it is when something is put into production that new more efficient ways of making them are developed, and they get smaller and cheaper and more powerful and more effective.

Over time and use and experience you start expanding performance and improving performance but these things don't happen quickly in the lab.

In the lab new software can be developed to give new functions and new performances but they can only be developed so far in a lab... it is not just production, but the money generated with the first sales that allow improvements and refinements in the design and performance as well as in production.

Case in point there was Mine warfare boats they were making.... the first one took 30 days for the main super structure to be put together because it was a lot of pieces moulded and joined together with resins. After they made the first one and went through the actual process of making one they found so many short cuts they could take, so many things they did one at a time in order to make sure it worked properly that the second boat they did it took three days, now that is not going to happen every time but when working with new technology you do everything carefully and in order, but once you have them in production you can work out ways of speeding everything up dramatically and also improving production quality and handling so you end up with fewer dud elements.

They put PESA radars in service in the 1970s and that was a dramatic step forward in radar technology because electronic beam scanning is a core advantage of AESA radars... as shown by the performance of the F-14A whose famous test example of shooting down 6 targets at different speeds  and different distances all at one time. With a mechanically scanned radar though all six targets had an altitude difference of about 510m to get a scan rate high enough to keep track of the targets during the engagement.

The MiG-31 with its PESA radar used simpler more basic SALH missiles but could kill targets at any angle or altitude because electronic scanning is fast and covers the entire field of view of the radar.

Of course now the Russian AF is buying MiG-35s it is getting funding and will get experience it needs to get better and for production of modules to improve and get cheaper over time.