niaz
PDF THINK TANK: CONSULTANT
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How much would needed to be invested if Pakistan decided to make a completely indigenous aircraft?
Also, what aspects of the plane do we have complete indigenous capabilities, and which aspects of the plane (ie. Engine making/designing) do we need advances in?
It is possible that Pakistan could design aircraft frame ‘ab initio’ with proper software. But this will only be on paper. We don’t have technology to manufacture aircraft engines. Therefore Pakistan won’t be able to design and build a complete aircraft in flying condition.
It is estimated that an all metal aircraft frame uses about 20% Titanium. Additionally, in modern military aircrafts a large percentage of “Composites’ are also used as these are lighter and tougher than metal, though far more difficult to repair. Don’t think we have metallurgy skills to forge Titanium and /or Composites.
Indian LCA is still waiting for a suitable power plant and JF-17 wouldn’t have been to fly without the Russian engines. Even Swedish Grippen uses US made engines.
As a rough guess, it would cost at least $500-million in R&D (with manpower cost at Pakistani levels) for a brand new design to come to fruition. However, even a country like Israel had to give up on ‘Lavi’ as being too costly to produce on its own. Europeans form a consortium (pooling of resources) of 2 to 3 countries and it takes 10 years in R&D before an aircraft finally emerges. Rotary aircraft is even more complex to design and build.
Most companies that started aircraft manufacture were initially car manufacturing firms.
So far Pakistan has not yet made a car or a truck of it own design. I mean manufacturing all parts of the car including the body and the engines from scratch. We don’t make engine for Al Khalid either. These come from Ukraine.
Co-production with China is a great enough achievement for a country such as Pakistan which is short on cash as well as technical manpower. It is much cheaper to buy an aircraft in complete knocked down condition and assemble it locally. We should start with manufacturing spare part parts before we can even start to think of complete manufacture of an aircraft or a helicopter from scratch.
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