India’s ambitious plan to further expand its fighter jet development programme is making steady progress, with the design of the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) frozen now.
“The AMCA configuration has been frozen. Now, we have to have one last dialogue with the Air Force to decide how we go about the engine choice…. We will have a strategy for building the AMCA by the middle of this year,” said P.S. Subramanyam, Director of the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) under the DRDO, who heads India’s combat aircraft programme.
He was speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of a workshop on ‘Embedded Systems for Defence Applications’ organised by the Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory at Nedumbassery on Friday.
On the choice of the engine, Mr. Subramanyam said it would be prudent to procure and integrate an available engine into the aircraft so to ensure that the project was not held up. “Since the fighter has been designed to take on an engine with a higher thrust, we can integrate it as and when such an engine is available. This is what has been done by Dassault in the Rafael development programme.”
Mr. Subramanyam was confident of the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas (Mk 1) obtaining final operational clearance by year-end.
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