Eight years after walking out of the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) project with Russia over cost concerns and technology transfer, India has initiated efforts to “co-join” the French-led Future Combat Air System (FCAS), opening the possibility of India entering a sixth-generation fighter programme.
Air Cmde Gaurav Mani Tripathi (Retd), a former fighter pilot and Director (Ops and Strategy) at Veda Aeronautics, tells TNIE that the question is not simply whether India gets technology transfer but what it gains beyond the operational capability of the eventual aircraft.
Excerpts:
Is calling a possible Indian entry into FCAS “another FGFA” a fair comparison?
The basic question is fair. An aircraft that works delivers operational capability, but what about long-term developmental capability, IP, industrial capability and design capability?
Genuine technology transfer hardly ever happens. It needs a peculiar set of circumstances, either your benefactor has no choice but you or they are in distress, as Russia was in the late 1990s.
If France does not hand over its most sensitive IP, what can India realistically gain from FCAS?
Look at Turkey and South Korea. Both started out building aircraft with heavy foreign involvement, and both went on to develop more sophisticated indigenous capabilities.
Or look at what Maruti did to our automotive industry. What arrived with it was not just a car. It was skills, techniques and the ability to run a complex programme, from inventories and supply chains to manufacturing processes and the wider ecosystem.
And the pool of trained manpower Maruti created did not stay put. As it grew, it moved, carrying those skills across to other companies. You may not absorb the technology itself, but you learn a great deal from partnering with somebody more capable than you. It is like batting at the non-striker’s end while Sachin Tendulkar is on strike.
Take the engine example. If the foreign partner retains the engine core, what does India actually learn that it can carry into the next generation?
Suppose Safran designs the core entirely: compressor, combustion chamber and turbine. HAL as a partner still learns the casing, ducting, exhaust, heat shields, thermal management, the gearboxes and the fuel feed, which is a big thing.
Having learned the peripherals with a foreign core, in the next programme you indigenise one module of the core, then the next, then the hot section. That is incremental innovation. We are not at level zero. We already have capabilities in jet-engine development. The issue is improving reliability, materials and performance.
What would make an FCAS partnership a success for India and what would make it another FGFA?
I will not comment on specifics because the shape of any agreement is presumably still being worked out. But in principle there is nothing wrong with a foreign partnership, provided you are committed to a long-term, structured programme and you plan your next iteration in time.
If you do not do that, then yes, call it a failure. A purely indigenous effort will also cost money, and with no fifth generation behind us, the timelines would be far longer. So I don’t think it can be dismissed offhand. I think it is a good idea, provided there is a clear plan for what comes next.
Should India be planning the fighter after FCAS before it even joins FCAS? And where does the private sector fit in?
The private sector needs to be brought in early. Bring it in late, with no visibility of future orders, and it cannot make the investments because capability and capacity both have to be created. So, we need an oversight mechanism for transparent selection of private sector partners so they enter early.
These are cutting-edge programmes and we know the limitations of our industrial base. Much of the machinery will have to be imported. We are not France, Israel, Japan, the US or Germany, where precision machine tooling has been a historical strength.
So decide early what can go out to the private sector. If networking is the core of the sixth generation, then by all means keep its development within the government. But the broader industrial ecosystem should be brought in early.