You're welcome and I hope this thread stays civil and doesn't deteriorate into racist and anti religious abuse.
I've seen the buildings that were inaugurated for Aviation City. but not any of the actual facilities that are required to do the design and testing work. All of it takes time, but these are the first steps in a long marathon that needs to be run before real capability exists to design and build an indigenous fighter.
Perhaps you have some idea of the scale of investment that is being made and the facilities that will be developed?
PAF has its expertise in flying, its tactics and all of the activities that go on for maintenance, arming, SOPs, even overhaul, etc. However, Design knowledge is mostly not a part of ANY Air Force in the world. They know the basics and the theory no question, but they won't be employing the hundreds of engineers with the specialised skills that OEMs employ.
That is why even with decades of Transfer of Technology to HAL, they took so much time with the Tejas. Because watching others do it, and being given exact instructions on how to manufacture and assemble a fighter is one thing, but doing it from scratch is an altogether different exercise. It is levels of magnitude harder. the PAC Kamra experience with the JF-17 is ToT. China has the real knowledge and skills on the design and how to productionize the design.
Not sure how the FBW design expertise was gained when there is not a single FBW equipped product that PAC designed. Maybe you could shed more light on how that happened.
I would hope that PAC is smart and doesn't attempt commercial airliners or even regional jets- unless it wants to lose the Govt. of Pakistan a massive pot of money.
It would be impossible without taking the first steps towards a clean sheet design that is much smaller in scale. Regional jets or anything larger require massive investments in infrastructure and manpower and that is a big no-no without a VERY VERY GOOD business case. Just look at how Bombardier fared. They've exited the commercial jetliner business altogether, despite having a good product. It sucked more money out of the company than anyone imagined, needed the Quebec govt. to pour nearly a billion $ and take a huge stake in the program to save it. China, with all the money they have, haven't yet put the C-919 into service and don't have a single non-Chinese Airline customer..even the Chinese customers they have are thanks to CCP directives, not because they're better than the A-320 or B-737. The COMAC ARJ21 is basically an obsolete design and will never see service outside of China. Mitsubishi is not faring particularly well either with its Space Jet with a negative order book worth nearly $1 billion.
On the Indian side, I'm not at all convinced that the Indian RTA-90 will ever actually see light of day. It'll continue to be a NAL project (and NAL is a small lab by comparison to HAL) and unless a private sector consortium takes a huge stake in it and wants to put it into production, we'll only see RTA-70 and RTA-90 electronically and never for real. Because even with civilian air sector and traffic 10 times bigger than Pakistan, the business case is not there for the massive investment that is required for commercial jetliners. Only way possible is if the Govt. of India is hell bent on establishing an Embraer like company in India.
TBH, the online trolling of the Tejas makes 0% difference in the real world- to those who operate it day and day out and to the decision makers. Those that are associated with the program know what it is capable of and that's what matters most. Because the Govt. of India provides funds to keep it running- they need to see the impact of the program to continue to invest money, whether internet posters do or not is immaterial.
Public perception for the program has also changed over the years as it has entered service and good things are being said about it by IAF people and it has been proving itself in IAF exercises despite it only being at IOC level.
Earlier, every article would start with "Tejas, 30 years in the making"..which was a complete lie. It is like saying the AMCA is 10 years in the making already because concept studies started 10 years ago.
Most people trolling the Tejas program don't know much about the program or how it has changed the Indian aerospace landscape. If the ACM can say that the MRCA will be the last imported fighter in India's history, then he says so because of the tremendous jump that has been made over the last 2 decades, all thanks to the LCA program. And these are not idle boasts- the IAF would NEVER have committed to that kind of thing if they didn't believe they would get world class products from DRDO/ADA/HAL with private suppliers backing them up.
I am fully aware of the genesis of the JF-17 program and why the decisions were made that led to the design choices that were made since I followed the program on other forums.
However, I do feel that if Pakistan wanted to establish the design capabilities for the next gen of fighters, it needed to take up a substantial bit of the work packages for the JF-17 at the very start. But timeline was first priority and that meant that CAC did almost all of the design and development and PAF and PAC were involved in Program Management, MMI design and assembly related activities. Why didn't Pakistan take on the development of at least some of the avionics for the JF-17?
Again, I want to give you a wake up call- why did CAC need to do the work for JF-17 Block 3? Surely the scope of it meant that integrating Chinese equipment should have been possible by PAC Kamra. I mean the JF-17 Block 3 isn't a new jet- it is upgrading the radar, adding MAWS and some other items right? Does CAC own the IP to the JF-17 and hence PAC Kamra cannot work on it on without CAC taking up the lions share of the work?
An ever bigger opportunity was with the JF-17B! Look at the Brazilians, how they negotiated the Gripen E/F contract. The Swedes didn't want a twin seater, the Brazilians did. So they negotiated for 100s of Embraer engineers to be trained in Sweden, on fighter design even though Embraer has been designing commercial regional jetliners for decades. And then, the first Gripen F was developed in Brazil, with Saab supporting fully. The Brazilians don't even have plans for a 5th gen fighter as of now, but the knowledge to be gained was worth it totally.
Shouldn't Pakistan have demanded that the JF-17B be designed at PAC Kamra or Aviation City and CAC provide all the know-how and know-why (which is the most important part of knowledge transfer) to hundreds of Pakistani engineers so they could put that knowledge to work on the next gen design? Alright, the JF-17B would then have come 4-5 years later, but would that have really mattered compared to the more valuable learning of the design skills? It is because of that, that I feel that the Project Azm will be a derivative of a Chinese design. Because the hard steps have not been put for any program so far by Pakistan.
China is to Pakistan the way the Soviet Union was for India in the 1970s and 1980s. Why put in the really hard work when your ally will supply it to you for cheap and do all the hard work? Thanks to the Soviet Union, we built hundreds of fighters via ToT. But till the Tejas, we didn't know WHY the fighter was designed a particular way or how to do it ourselves. And it took us 20 years+ of sustained effort to get to where people in the Govt. of India and IAF are confident about a 5th gen program and were perfectly fine with rejecting a Russian PAK-FA based FGFA (which was the easy 5th gen solution for India).
Food for thought, right?
DRDO (not HAL/ADA) labs have been researching and working on RAM coatings and RAM skins for a while now. They have already built RAM coatings and RAM skins that are being tested. I can't find the images on my laptop right now, will post it when I find them.
ORANGE facility to test RCS of objects
link to article
link
RCS measurement software developed by CSIR-NAL
