Kota Harinarayana is widely regarded as the father of India?s Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), having led for 15 years the teams at the Aeronautical Development Agency that developed the homegrown fighter from scratch to the flying demonstration of its first prototype in 2001. A decade after the first flight, the LCA on Monday received a ?release to services? certificate that would pave the way for its induction into the Indian Air Force. As the LCA?s variants are in various stages of development, Kota Harinarayana, now a Raja Ramanna Fellow at the Bangalore-based National Aerospace Laboratories, tells FE?s Ajay Sukumaran that investment on infrastructure and more involvement of the private sector will be critical to build on the experience.
The LCA?s successor, Mk-II, with a more powerful engine is under development now. With the experience gained so far, would it now be easier to keep up deadlines?
I think so, because in the first phase we didn?t have infrastructure, technologies, trained manpower. So we had to establish all those things and build capacity and capability. But today all those things are in place. The industry is also in a much better position. And Mk-II is basically the re-engineering, putting a new engine and slight changes to the structure to fit the new engine. So I don?t see any issue at all here. We are not bringing in new technologies, the manpower is already there and people are familiar with the LCA.
ADA has also begun planning for the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft and the Unmanned Combat Aircraft. What would be the key lessons from the LCA experience?
The key lessons are that you must develop technology ahead of the project. Infrastructure has to be paid attention, investments must be made in infrastructure creation and the private sector must enter in a much much bigger way because we need a lot more capacity in this country to undertake these new projects. These three things should be done so that the projects have all the ingredients required for it to move forward faster.
How do you see capability in the private sector now, since we are talking about offsets in a big way?
If you look at the engineering services today, a lot of IT companies have gone into it and the people who are manning at the senior level are the people who got trained through projects like the LCA. If we wouldn?t have had this project, we wouldn?t have people who had the understanding and capability. So I do believe today with the available technology base, the industry is seeing the offsets on one side and within the country a lot more projects coming up. They have a lot of opportunity. They must invest in infrastructure, must invest in people and in technology. They must also invest in R&D. It must be done, it can?t be free (laughs). I think there is a realisation that they have to do all this, and they are ready to invest.