Boeing looks to expand association with BEL

The defence PSU Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) which has a partnership with Boeing for the Analysis and Experimentation Centre (A&E Centre) in Bangalore, is said to be mulling an additional centre at its Ghaziabad site near Delhi.

Projects such as the A&E Centre, which was set up during the early part of 2009 by Boeing, is said to benefit industry partners while providing an environment for exploring collaborative projects between domestic and foreign companies to work in practice and build on the Boeing experience with defence experimentation best practice in other countries.

Boeing India’s A&E Centre in Bangalore is the third one outside the US, with the other two in Australia and United Kingdom. The centre allows its customers the opportunity to explore options for future systems in a virtual environment. While using the analysis and experimentation methods, the collaborative approach supports the defence forces in the US, the UK and Australia.

The centre is staffed with Indian ex-military operations analysts and, modelling and simulation engineers. Comprising of reconfigurable laboratories and visualisation space, the centre draws on the experience from other nations where experimentation is a part of defence planning and equipment acquisition. Boeing will also transfer a number of mature A&E tools that are not commercially available anywhere else.

“The tools will be made available for use by the Indian defence customer and our local partners,” said Dinesh A Keskar, president, Boeing India, adding “this would also allow us to integrate locally-developed intellectual property with these established tools.”

Boeing is working with the defence community to identify key capability challenges, and the local Boeing team will conduct analyses and warfighting experiments. The process will see frequent interactions with the defence customer to ensure the right experimental questions are developed and, right tools and techniques are used to address the questions.

“The process encourages participation in experiments by experienced serving personnel. This ensures that the experimentation environment is for purpose and exposes service personnel to future systems options. The opinions of these personnel can then be fed back to the operational community to improve current and future warfighting capability and concepts,” said an official from Boeing.