India bought single-engine Tejas fighter jets totalling $5,5B

By Boyko Nikolov On Feb 19, 2020

NEW DELHI, (BM) – India has bought new single-engine Tejas fighters from the local company HAL as the largest military purchase in recent years, learned BulgarianMilitary.com, citing TV channel Zvezda.

The total transaction for the purchase of aircraft transactions amounted to $ 5.46 billion.

It is noted that initially, an Indian manufacturing company requested $ 7.9 billion for the supply of 83 aircraft.

Tejas single-engine multi-purpose Indian fighters are equipped with an engine with perfect maintainability, an air-to-air refueling system, armed with long-range missiles, and can also carry electronic bombs to “blind” enemy rockets and radars.

HAL Tejas is an Indian single-engine, delta wing, multirole light fighter designed by the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) for the Indian Air Force and Indian Navy. It came from the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) programme, which began in the 1980s to replace India’s ageing MiG-21 fighters. In 2003, the LCA was officially named “Tejas”.

Tejas has a tail-less compound delta-wing configuration with a single dorsal fin. This provides better high-alpha performance characteristics than conventional wing designs. Its wing root leading edge has a sweep of 50 degrees, the outer wing leading edge has a sweep of 62.5 degrees, and trailing edge has a forward sweep of four degrees.

It integrates technologies such as relaxed static stability, fly-by-wire flight control system, multi-mode radar, integrated digital avionics system and composite material structures. It is the smallest and lightest in its class of contemporary supersonic combat aircraft.

The Tejas is the second supersonic fighter developed by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) after the HAL HF-24 Marut. As of 2016, the Tejas Mark 1 was in production for the Indian Air Force (IAF) and the naval version was undergoing flight tests for Indian Navy (IN). The projected requirement for the IAF was 200 single-seat fighters and 20 twin-seat trainers, while the IN expected to operate at least 40 single-seat fighters.

The first Tejas IAF unit, No. 45 Squadron IAF Flying Daggers was formed on 1 July 2016 with two aircraft. Initially stationed at Bangalore, 45 Squadron was later relocated to its home base at Sulur, Tamil Nadu. The Minister of State for Defence, Subhash Bhamre, reported to parliament that the indigenous content of the Tejas was 59.7% by value and 75.5% by number of line replaceable units in 2016.

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BulgarianMilitary.com
Editorial team
Source: Oreanda news agency