Tejas crash highlights India's history of playing catch-up in air power

It is a brilliant, reasonably priced, and mostly homemade aircraft with a stellar safety record; only two crashes in 24 years since its first flight. But its crash is a moment of introspection

The unfortunate Tejas crash and the pilot’s death at the Dubai Air Show are a shattering moment. The Indian Air Force (IAF) is too strong, proud and professional to let this weigh it down. For India’s policymakers, however, this is a useful juncture to reflect on whether they’ve been, and are being entirely fair to the IAF, given what it needs. Or in the demands they place on the IAF, the compromises and “adjustments” they seek.

 

It is also important, however, that we take a deep breath and remind ourselves that pilots are particularly tough people. Among the toughest of them will be found in the IAF because globally they are some of those few who remain perpetually in operational mode. 

It is not to say that the Indian Army and Indian Navy enjoy long tenures in peacetime. The IAF stands out for special mention for three reasons. One, it is the first responder in most escalatory or punitive situations, given the Modi government’s every-act-of-terror-is-an-act-of-war-deserving-instant retaliation doctrine. Second, because the IAF is the only one of the three services where combat is carried out almost exclusively by its officers, who form a small, tightly knit community. And third, of the three the IAF is the most technology-dependent.

 

Once again, since we understand the inter-service competition, we must acknowledge that technology is critical to the other two as well. It is just that in the air force, the fighting elements —the instruments to guide, control and protect them on the ground —  all bristle with ever-changing electronics.

 

To the IAF’s challenges we can add a fourth. Unlike the army and the navy, where numbers can sometimes fill technology gaps here and there, the IAF has less leeway. Further, since the capital cost of combat-aviation assets is not as high as that for the navy, it is more possible for Pakistan to keep pace, even edge ahead in some areas — especially because it is customised for air-to-air warfare in very short skirmishes. And the Chinese are always there to help.

 

Since the mid-1950s, when the Americans started giving the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) their latest fighters, the IAF has mostly been forced to play catchup. In 1965, it fought the PAF with a supersonic and missile advantage in F-104 Starfighters. By 1971, deepening relations with the Soviet Union brought parity and in the seventies the Pakistanis were still recovering.

 

By 1984 the picture changed dramatically as the first F-16s arrived, gifted by the United States (US) five years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This, however, is not a history of reconstruction of the seven-decade race for air superiority in the subcontinent. It is more about the critical dilemmas India has battled on this front. Of these, Tejas is one outcome and a reasonably good one. It’s a brilliant, reasonably priced, mostly homemade aircraft with a stellar safety record, given only two crashes in 24 years since its first flight. But, is it the best we could have done by 2025? Is it still playing catchup with the competition? Couldn’t we have done this much earlier? Remember that when Manohar Parrikar as defence minister armtwisted a reluctant IAF 2015 to accept Tejas Mark 1A, the deliveries were committed in 2022. Now, we will be fortunate if the first squadron becomes fully operational by early 2027. There is a tactical and strategic price to pay for five-year delays.

 

Pakistan, meanwhile, has produced several iterations of the JF-17, with no claims to it being more than 57 per cent “indigenous”. It is a joint venture of the Pakistan Aircraft Complex (PA) and Chengdu Aircraft Corporation. The Tejas Mk 1A inductions in the next few months might fill some of these gaps, but Hindustan Aeronautics’ struggles with synchronising the new, swadeshi electronic warfare (EW) suite with its Elbit (Israeli) radar and missile integrations and some other technologies have increased the delays and the adversaries, meanwhile, will not stay frozen. Since these are mostly software issues these have also deprived Hindustan Aeronautics of the usual excuse of delay in the arrival of GE engines.

 

Once again, while it is a great idea to have your own fighter, we serve ourselves poorly by being constantly trapped in a catchup situation. That is central to the many air-power dilemmas we are talking about.

 

In the late 1950s, when the Pakistanis were getting their first Sabres, Jawaharlal Nehru’s government searched for alternatives. The Soviet linkage had not yet come up, the commitment to true non-alignment was heady but it also led to self-denial for the military, especially the IAF. The first IAF jets, Vampires from Britain and the French, Dassault Ouragan (Toofani) were obsolete on arrival, inducted in 1953. The IAF’s acquisition of British Hunters and the Gnat, which the Royal Air Force had discarded, was a quick fix and the gap with the missile-equipped Sabres and night-capable Starfighters remained.

 

Foreseeing this, in the mid-1950s Nehru decided to build a domestic, supersonic jet fighter. He spotted German Kurt Tank, designer of a most successful Luftwaffe fighter FW-190 (FW for the Focke-Wulf), more than 20,000 copies of which flew and fought in World War II. Since Tank was no Nazi, he was among those in demand internationally. He was initially hired by Argentina but soon unemployed as Juan Peron lost power. Nehru brought him to India as director of the Madras Institute of Technology. Tank quickly put together a team of Indian engineers. One of them was a young man called APJ Abdul Kalam.

 

The design of what was named HF-24 Marut was great. But there was no engine. In the course of time Tank left and India persisted. 

The aspiration of breaking the sound barrier was never realised. The maximum it did was Mach .93 and that with two Orpheus engines, which India was making for the tiny, single-engine Gnat. A project to build an engine jointly with Egypt failed. But so strong is the fighter nationalism that India still built 147 copies, of which 28 crashed. It was fully retired only in 1985 and nobody in the IAF shed a tear. 

Some similar waffling has bedevilled the Tejas. The government first cleared what it then called the light combat aircraft (LCA) in 1983. The head of the Defence Research and Development Organisation then, a fine metallurgist VS Arunachalam (in his forties), would sometimes say, in self-deprecating humour: Call it “the last chance for Arunachalam”. Between him and fantastic aeronautical scientists they put together a great team. We had a design ready soon enough.

 

Then, it took another 18 years to take its first flight, having been named Tejas by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It took another 15 years for initial operational clearance (IOC), another further four for full operational clearance (FOC). The story continues.

 

This is the short and regrettable story of Indian air power getting caught in a desperate seven-decade technology race from behind. Lately any valid customer’s impatience with the IAF or demand for new foreign fighters has been attacked viciously on social media. There are suggestions that until the IAF is willing to accept something, maybe “10-15 per cent” below the ideal, our domestic technologies can’t progress. Anybody asking for a faster filling of the gaps is dismissed as “Import Bahadur”. The forces, trained to keep silent, unfortunately, make a poor lobby for themselves. Or they’d tell you that in a combat nobody offers you a handicap because you are catching up.

 

This tragic loss in Dubai and the sacrifice of an incredibly skilled young life are an important moment to reflect on our self-inflicted limitations and air power gaps. For clarity, there is nothing to suggest something was wrong with this aircraft, or its type, the Tejas Mark 1. But if it reminds us of our lackadaisical approach, and brings about change, this sacrifice would have achieved something critically important for India.

 

By special arrangement with The Print