HYDERABAD: A walk onto the static display line at Wings India 2026 and the first thing that hits one is how simple the SJ-100 looks. Not sleek like an A220, not aggressive like an E2. Just… there. Ninety-eight seats, high-wing T-tail, the kind of regional jet one has seen a thousand times at smaller airports in Russia or the old Soviet allies. Except this one is different in the only way that matters right now: almost nothing inside it comes from the West.
They flew the United Aircraft Corporation’s Yakovlev-designed SJ-100 to Begumpet airport here the hard way; Zhukovsky to Tashkent to Hyderabad, long legs over mountains and borders, from snow to sun.
Aviation enthusiasts keep asking the SJ-100 team the same two questions: “Is it really 100% Russian now?” and “So… are you selling any?” The answers are: Near-total import substitution. PD-8 engines, Russian avionics, Russian wiring, Russian interiors. The old SaM146 (jointly developed with France’s Safran) is gone, sanctions made sure of that. That aircraft depended on foreign avionics.
One engineer, mid-sentence, shrugs, “The PD-8 is not pitched as a fuel-burn challenger to CFM’s LEAP or Pratt & Whitney’s geared turbofan. It is designed so that sustainment does not depend on export licences from jurisdictions that can say no overnight. Independence first. Performance second.”
Will India ever build own jets for civilians?
The HAL pavilion has a scale model of the SJ-100 with HAL markings and the tricolour on the tail. It’s the visual they prepared months ago when the MoU was signed in Moscow last October. Framework agreement, they call it. No production contract, no firm localisation percentage, no Indian airline saying “we’ll take a bunch”. A framework that grants HAL manufacturing rights in India if the stars align. Just that.
HAL officials remain measured. One, requesting anonymity, put it bluntly, “We stopped building civil aircraft thirty years ago. Someone has to start again.”
“The PD-8 sitting under that SJ-100 wing isn’t a miracle,” says Avaneendra, a theoretical knowledge instructor with Trans Aviacons Pvt Ltd. “It’s an engine born out of necessity. Lower bypass ratio than Western competition, heavier, probably thirstier on fuel. But it runs without Western strings, it’s been bird-tested, it’s been flown, and spares don’t need NATO-country export licences. For a country that wants to run regional services into Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh, that math starts to look interesting.”
In official statements, Rostec has described India as a key market for civil aviation technology, particularly as demand grows for regional connectivity.
Inside the Global CEOs Forum, the mood is brisk. New airports are opening every few months, UDAN routes are flying to places that were only names on a map five years ago. But conversations in the corridors and at the coffee stations circle back to propulsion. “Propulsion built for an environment where tomorrow’s supplier may not answer emails,” quips Aneet, a trainee pilot.
India’s Kaveri programme remains a reference point to this day. GTRE’s long-running turbofan effort, originally intended for Tejas fighters. Decades in and backed by substantial investment, its failure to reach operational maturity has cast a long shadow over indigenous engine efforts, civil included.
The question that echoes isn’t whether India should build its own aircraft, but whether a market of this scale can afford to stay grounded.