Welcome back to India Defence Online...If you haven't done so yet, subscribe to the RSS feed as it will save you a lot of time. Thanks for following the site!
The forthcoming Aero-India 2009 air show in Bangalore will witness the inking of an agreement between EADS of Germany and India for the flight trials of the home grown Light Combat Aircraft (LCA). The $20 million contract will be awarded to EADS for their technical help and consultancy in the flight trials of the LCA.
Bangalore-based Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) has undertaken the design, monitoring and development of the LCA project. LCA is an advanced technology, single seat, single engine, supersonic, light-weight, all-weather, multi-role, air superiority fighter designed for air-to-air, air-to-ground and air-to-sea combat roles.
ADA had sought international help and expertise in 2008 for the design and development work in the Flight Testing stage of the LCA. Technical and commercial bids were invited from EADS of France, SAAB of Sweden, Dassault of France, Boeing and Lockheed Martin of the United States and MiG Corporation of Russia.
Under the contract awarded to EADS, it will do fast-track execution of flight testing towards Initial Operational Clearance (IOC) and Final Operational Clearance (FOC). The consultancy will be for two phases and the salient areas of work will be Flight Envelop Expansion, High Angle of Attack (AOA) flight testing and aero-data validation and upgrade, External Stores Carriage and Release and Flight Tests with emphasis on stores separation modelling and testing, Wake modelling and Wake penetration Flight Tests and Refinements to existing Real Time Simulation models/stools.
EADS has a crucial task in its hand and experts feel that a couple of years and around 1,500 hours of flight testing will be inevitable before the move from IOC to FOC will take place. The areas of concern till the IOC stage is reached include integration of external carriage, integration with the Multi Mode Rada, fuel tanks and other external pods.
Presently, eight Limited Series Production (LSP) aircraft, along with two technical demonstrators (TDS) and five prototype vehicles are part of the LCA’s design and development programmes being executed.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
