India’s decades-old quest for right US aircraft engine

How much the recent India-US MoU for the manufacture of F414s will spur the growth of the indigenous aircraft industry is a matter left to the imagination

The announcement of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between General Electric and the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States for the manufacture of the F414 engines in India has set off euphoria that may be disproportionate to the situation on the ground.

The statement says: “This trailblazing initiative to manufacture F414 engines in India will enable greater transfer of US jet engine technology than ever before. The leaders committed their governments to working collaboratively and expeditiously to support the advancement of this unprecedented co-production and technology transfer proposal.” Notice the caveats there? A lot now depends on the process, and how in sync the various bureaucracies are.

Modi’s US visit yielded two major defence deals known to the public. One, the procurement of 31 MQ-9B UAVs from General Atomics, the other the General Electric deal to exploit the Tejas which is already a success story. The UAV it is a straightforward procurement; the GE F414 not so much. Tejas Mark 1 has already entered squadron service, and the then Air Chief RKS Bhaduria has said, “Tejas is the best in class. Take my word for it.” Ten years before he said this, he was a Group Captain in the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) programme.

Engine trouble?

Ultimately, an MoU is only an expression of intent, not a contract, detailed and specific. Any agreement requires a US Congressional clearance, and getting the production lines ready is not a trivial matter.

The engine selection of the next upgraded version of the Tejas has been hanging fire for nearly two decades. Regarding the earlier version, not enough has been put out there by the makers, only a couple of squadrons; each squadron is roughly 18 aircraft, including two trainers. Will there be steady supply of engines for the rest for which orders have been placed by the Indian Air Force? The present MoU is for fresh orders of the upgraded version.

Proverbially, there could be many a slip between the cup and the lip. Will the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) succeed in putting it in the prototypes and come up with LCA Mark 2? In the meanwhile, reports have started appearing that the French, ahead of Modi’s Bastille Day (July 14) visit, are willing to offer the Safran engine for the Advanced Multirole Combat Aircraft, the next generation aircraft with terms that are even more attractive and rather more contemporary. There is also the matter of the Rolls Royce engine. Maybe they will better the French terms. How does all this square with the situation on the ground?

‘Get the F404 when the window opens’

Although it might appear that the wheel has just been invented in 2014, so far as the GE engine in concerned, it is not quite so. Any development of an aircraft begins with the engine. The choice of the engine often precedes the design of the aircraft.

New Delhi went shopping for a suitable engine, specifically the F404, in the summer months of 1985. The brief from SR Valluri, who had then recently taken charge of the spanking new Aeronautical Development Agency, was: ‘Get the F404 when the window opens’.

Robert McFarlane, the then US National Security Advisor, and VS Arunachalam, who was adviser to the Defence Minister and headed the DRDO, were co-ordinating the science and technology mechanism set up after Indira Gandhi’s successful 1982 visit to the US. The F404 engine had been certified for the F18s that the US Navy were flying them for about five years. It was recent tech back then. The other preference had been the Rolls Royce RB199 but the terms were unsuitable. The Russians refused flat out.

India’s LCA team at General Electric, United States, in 1985. (From Left): S Jaishankar, A P J Abdul Kalam, K G Narayanan, K K Ganapathy. V S Arunachalam (Fourth from Right), and R Narasimha (Third from Right). Credit: Special Arrangement

Arunachalam led the team to the US. The other members of the team were Rodham Narasimha who had moved into National Aeronautical Laboratory as Director, A P J Abdul Kalam, director DRDL when he moved from space, K K Ganapathy, General Manager, HAL, K G Narayanan, who was sort of a troubleshooting OSD in the office of Arunachalam. They were given access by the Pentagon and State Department to the more sensitive technologies. A young first secretary in the Indian embassy in Washington accompanied the Indian delegation to the GE engine factory at Lynn, Massachusetts. That young first secretary is today India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.

They had money to buy just 12 engines. It was a direct export. No tech transfer. Eleven came to India in 1986, a present as it were after Rajiv Gandhi’s successful visit to the US in 1985, when US President Ronald Reagan famously held an umbrella aloft for Rajiv Gandhi as he accompanied him to see him off in the car (see image below).

Screengrab of US President Ronald Reagan with India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, June 12, 1985.

The Tejas soup

How much tech transfer this time is the question, and how will it benefit the indigenous Mark 2 Tejas for which timelines are already set? Tejas is a bit of an alphabetical and numerical soup, with Mark 1, Mark 1A, and so on. Tejas Mark 2 is supposed to fly in 2025. By 2029, production should start.

If India inks the GE F414 agreement in early 2024, the thinking is that the first aircraft with the F414 will be out in three years, i.e., 2027. Could this be unwarranted optimism, given the experience on the previous programme? The actual agreement to produce will be cleared in the US State and Commerce Department. After approval, there is a process of integration of parts and components and modules imported from the US and assembled here. The second phase would be the manufacture of the parts and modules in India.

Know how and know why

True, HAL has a well organised engine manufacturing facility with 50 years of experience. A lot, therefore, would depend on the depth of tech being transferred. One extreme would be the Americans will disclose everything including design rules. The other extreme is that they provide subsystems such as compressor, engine control, and such like but what goes inside those will not be shared. In between these two extremes is a whole host of spectra. What we will get will depend on the bargaining we do, what kind of a platform we are on, and the capacity to absorb the tech on offer. It is important to get not merely the ‘know how’ but also the ‘know why’. Finally, do we have the finances to absorb it?

The most advanced engine we produce are the Russian engines (MiG, Sukhoi) in Koraput, Orissa, but with not too much technology absorption, and some Western engines too in Bengaluru. After the infusion as a result of the current MoU, if anyone will see another ‘Indian’ engine is another matter altogether.

The Kaveri engine

The GE F414 is of 2000 vintage, about a quarter century old. The F404 was the beginning. The F404 was supposed to be a stop gap for the Kaveri engine which was a F404 spin-off. The Kaveri engine died in September 2004. Open-source epitaphs are hard to find. But a book, Radiance in Indian Skies: The Tejas Saga by Air Marshal P Rajkumar and B R Srikanth (Chapter 22: The Kaveri Engine and Multi-Mode Radar Development Projects, pages 163-164), provides a definite pointer.

Here is what seems to have happened: 60 hours of flight tests had already been done in the Gromov Flight Research Institute on an IL-76, which was used as a flying bed. It means that one of the giant Russian aircraft’s four engines had been replaced by the Kaveri, and plugged into the plane with all the telemetry and controls to monitor the performance of all sorts of parameters which were being sent to engineers who monitored real-time.

Source: Endeavours in Self Reliance, Defence Research (1983-2018), Published by DRDO, 2022

By the time an engine gets fitted on a test bed it can be safely said that much of the hard work is already behind, and it is easing into the final phase, which includes being tested for extreme hot and cold temperatures and behaviour under sustained stress, before clearance for being fitted into the aircraft. Completion of 60 hours of flying preceded by thousands of hours of tests on the ground is not negligible. At some point in the manoeuvres of the flight bed test over Moscow skies, the compressor blades rubbed against the casing.

It was a moment of reckoning for Kaveri. Failures are not unknown in such trial and error situations. The Russians were willing to take it up again. It was not a flight hazard. Industry insiders say Raja Ramana, having overseen the atom bomb and then having the oversight of the jet engine, quipped that an atom bomb was far easier to make than the jet engine which was far more complicated.

When the Kaveri programme began in the late eighties the thrust requirement was a modest 80 kilo newton — and by 2004 this was no longer suitable, and the thrust requirement had increased substantially. Thrust to weight ratio of the engine is critical to a good aircraft. It defines almost every aspect of the aircraft; how fast it can fly, how steeply it can climb, how agile it is during manoeuvres. The time and cost overruns factored into the new scenario were prohibitive.

Conclusion

As far as the LCA was concerned, Kaveri was dead. This was in 2004. We are now in 2023.

How much the recent developments will spur the growth of the indigenous aircraft industry, especially the activities of the Gas Turbine Research Establishment in Hyderabad (GTRE) and the Defence Metallurgical Research laboratory (DMRL) both of which contributed to the Kaveri engine is a matter left to the imagination.

(V Sudarshan, a senior journalist who writes on foreign policy, is author of Tuticorin: Adventures in Tamil Nadu’s Crime Capital.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.