The high-powered committee for building the first indigenous civilian aircraft in India has decided to configure a 90-seater civilian aircraft and is expected to give its report within the next year to the government. India is going ahead with the project despite the two decade-old experimentation with Saras, a 14-seater passenger aircraft, yet to get into commercial production.
The formation of the committee comes barely weeks after the Directorate General of Civil Aviation had said there was no technical flaw in the Saras aircraft. The Prototype-II of Saras aircraft, developed by CSIR’s NAL, had crashed during a test flight on March 6 last year killing the three-member crew.
The committee, chaired by former Indian Space Research Organisation Chairman G Madhavan Nair has members from the National Aerospace Laboratory, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Indian Space Research Organisation and other industry experts.
