Hello
@Water Car Engineer, hope you're doing well. I accept your input as valid but would
change it if I was in charge for reasons that I'm sure you'll understand with the post below.
A pole vaulter initiates a run with a backward swing or step. This might be needed here!
I gave a rare positive rating to PariK's answer to the thread mainly because he detailed the
industrial organization for us. What may be useful to complement that is a similar post on the
research and development to show how complex it also is compared to a private firms system
has we know in the West and even Russia and China.
For my part, I'll start with fundamentals of aircraft design to show what India is lacking that
may influence the AMCA program ab initio, as if it wasn't started yet ( wink WCEngineer ).
When Otto Lilienthal fancied himself Icarus and accomplished humanity's first control flight, he was an industry
owner ... making boilers and engines! Of course those were steam based and never powered his air machines.
Technology was lagging, you could say!
As motorized flight began a few years later, a flurry of individuals with engineering and inventing powers galore
built aircraft after aircraft each. Santos Dumont, Blériot, Farman, Latham, Fabre, Curtiss and that rarest of rare
shooting star, somehow forgotten nowadays, Coanda all made aircrafts. A young guy at that time also took hold
in aviation with a well-designed propeller; he has a place in our story : his name was Marcel Dassault.
The set-up [ inventors, engineers industrial with sportsmen for pilots ( Blériot did both ) ] lasted until after WWI.
Slowly, the transport of mail by plane criss-crossed the world and prompted the birth of passengers aviation.
The planes changed in many ways until WWII and turbines, radar, rockets ( jet precursors ) were all coming out the go-to-war impetus. If we remember the planes of that war, it is striking how many of them there were.
That was soon to disappear. Post WWII, the advances in plane making were split in two. Although the fields
overlapped heavily, the military side was going crazy with developments that sometimes warranted more
prototypes than production planes ( an omen of things to come ) while the civil aviation took over the
production line aspect of things that the long strings of bombers churned out by American plants had proven
to be possible.
This era saw an immense number of attempts by established manufacturers. Air forces kept more or less
buying any plane that was more than a half-baked idea as the Cold War kept budgets allowances for that.
But in the last decade of the 20th century, this could-go-to-war impetus vanished. And a new world if not
such a brave one by my views established itself with economic imperatives surpassing almost all others.
The ensuing diminution of cash flow to milavia procurements cause the extinction of the small firm sector
and left us with the talented
and state backed* as survivors.
[ Please take state backed in its widest sense; I don't accept differences between Congress-MIC / state involvement à la French,
state support as the Brits / state ownership and control as Russia or China as essential. Number of makers depends on size & will. ]
By the 21st century, big countries have two makers ( USA, China, Russia although that last may be more like 1 1/2 by now )
and smaller sized ones have a single entity ( fighter jet makers, not civilian ones ) and then only those with
will to do so of course. Out of these emerged today's precious few. And of those, the top tier belongs to
companies that have been at it for a long while : Lockheed 1912, BAe ( whose genetics trace back to Hawker in 1912 ), Boeing 1916 or the same year as Dassault's Hélice Éclair. Sukhoi & MiG 1939 both date back to WWII.
In a straight line through what I detailed above, those makers have been making planes since before the modern
era of lesser number of prototypes and longer development. And even with their background, some find it difficult
to adapt to the modern imperatives and situations, *cough, cough ... concurren-cough*.
As romantic as this short recounting may seem, it harbours one of the two main stumbling blocks faced by India
in the AMCA program. There is little that can replace experience. Dassault ( which I use again as I know it best
and is related to India ATM ) made fast jets, variable geometry winged planes, STOVL ones and so on before it
got to the Rafale. That builds a gigantic knowledge base. Their partnership with equipment makers is also old &
of course, so is their link to the state and the air force. And yet even with these clear advantages, the Rafale pro-gram was delayed by politico-economic imperatives for literally a decade! In a world where a great product may
lag by 10 years through no fault of its own, a timeline for an ambitious project needs to include as much leeway.
( Whatever your estimate for our subject, do add a possible 10 years hiatus
)
From this experience conundrum, I derive the idea that India lacks a past in designing planes. On the plus side,
this mitigates the aspect of failure that many tag to its industry but it needs to be accepted if the AMCA is to work.
As my friend PariK then, I'd consider partnership as a sine qua non condition for success.
But that also answers WaterCarEngineer : it may be wise, nah, it may be necessary to go back to the drawing
board. Great programs never succeed from flawed, biased or excessive requirements. Specifically, India should select a partner that can help in re-examining the whole program and listen to its input even if it hurts.
I understand this to require that a staunch overlook of development structures & procedures take places.
That is why I felt forced to ask for a complement of information on the research side of things before this convo
begins in earnest.
Back later with part two of my musings and great day all
and sorry for yesterday, PariK, I had an IRL friend to help, Tay.
P.S.
@knight11 I feel your worry as justified but we need to clear fundamentals first.
