LCA - India's Engineering Achivement

Hormuz P Mama in an article in Economic Times of 15 March 2008 wrote that Tejas light combat aircraft (LCA) is the very finest Indian engineering achievement in any field.

What are the reasons for such a conclusion?

It is the only such fourth generation aircraft to be developed by a Third world country. It is also the only such Asian aircraft with an indigenous design, engine, avionics, and the like. In the development of this aircraft a large number of advanced technologies and equipment have been developed indigenously. Some of them are co-cured cobonded composites, the mission and flight control computers, use of computational fluid dynamics for aerodynamic design, the fly-by-wire flight control system, full-glass cockpit, complex software, avionics integration and sensor fusion.

LCA will have exceptional standards of maintainability and reliability. It will require far fewer maintenance man hours per flight-hour than earlier aircraft. As a result, its life cycle cost will be the very lowest for any aircraft the IAF has ever had.

LCA may also have the very lowest flyaway (or initial purchase) cost of any combat aircraft. The estimates range from $2o million to about $35 million.

For some more details about Indigenous contributions

http://nrao-mech-engg.blogspot.com/2008/03/tejas-lca-indigenous-contributions.html