Hindustan Aeronautics Limited has plans to set up four manufacturing plants for the production of medium multi-role combat aircraft, light utility helicopter, fifth generation fighter aircraft and multi-role transport aircraft, a senior company official said today.
HAL Director (Design & Development), N C Agarwal, said the Bangalore-headquartered company, under the Ministry of Defence, is looking to set up a new complex for MMRCA. Government is to buy 18 aircraft under the MMRCA programme from a foreign manufacturer, with the remaining 108 to be produced by HAL under licence.
He said the HAL is scouting for a location for manufacture of light utility helicopter (LUH), and once it’s identified, government approval would be sought. Separate factories have also been proposed for fifth generation fighter aircraft (FGFA) and multi-role transport aircraft he said, adding, as per initial plans, MTA would be manufactured in Kanpur and FGFA in Nasik.
Agarwal said work has started on the preliminary design of FGFA. “Russian team is here (in Bangalore) to train our people”, he told PTI.
FGFA is a $6 billion project, to be equally shared by India and Russia. FGFA would have advanced features such as stealth, super cruise, ultra-manoeuvrability, highly integrated avionics suite, enhanced situational awareness, internal carriage of weapons and network centric warfare capabilities, officials said.
A contract for preliminary design of the FGFA has already been signed between HAL, Rosoboronexport and Sukhoi.
The Indo-Russian FGFA programme involves production of 200-250 aircraft. Agarwal said branch office of Bangalore-headquartered MTA Limited, the joint venture between HAL and Rosoboronexport & United Aircraft Corporation (UAC-TA) for the MTA project, would be opened in Moscow shortly.
MTA is a $600.7 million project, to be equally shared between the Indian and Russian partners.
On the LUH programme, he said the design has been frozen, the drawings are getting released and the parts are getting manufactured. On the armed variant of HAL’s advanced light helicopter (ALH), Agarwal said: “We have already done individual armament trials.
Each one of them have been separately tried. Now, we have to do it in a joint, combined mode. And that is slated to be completed at the end of the year”.
HAL would design and develop a new indigenous turboprop trainer, for which it has sought Government approval. Agarwal said HAL plans to offer performance based logistics (PBL) solutions to maintain the customers’ assets in optimum flying condition. It’s in final stage of discussions with IAF, he said. HAL is likely to start this initiative with the Hawk programme.
He said huge manpower of several hundreds would be required to roll out such an offering.
