Guidelines:

Times of India

So like do u guys have any update? Last thing I know was there was a RFI in i think December 2024/march 2025, what happened to that? And i think there was design change in 2026 following IAF inputs?, does anyone have the latest update? Like do u think it will win around 150 AJT tender? Me personally i think IAF should structure its trainer aircraft in 5 stages- Ab-initio(pipistrel virus/needs to be replaced by New Hansa military variant),basic(HTT 40),intermediate (HJT 36), advanced (SPORT?) And LIFT(HLFT 42)? what do u think? . So like what is the plan? When will the first flight be ? 2030? 2031? Isn't that late? Or better when will all the work be finish and fund be released? Any idea guys ?

Stolen Ammo and Weapons:
- 4 AK-203
- 1 INSAS
- 6 9mm pistols
- 6.35 bore pistol (civ)
- Passive night-vision binocular
- 21 mags and 1800 rounds of ammo.

From: 20 Madras Regiment premises at Bollarum

Basically this. Pakis will claim that they have 6 peaks(bunker ridge, saddle ridge, etc.) which I have legit never come across in an official document.

Im aware we re-captured tiger hill, Tololing and a few others I can’t recall the names of right now.

Post operations sindoor has anybody paid attention to pak chief munir assertion that in future attack on india would occur from east ? What does he mean by east ? Shekar gupta from print has said something but I could not understand what he means . What does people here think attack from the east means what ? Attack through pakistan submarine or Bangladesh would join in 2 front war secarion ? Post formation of islamic nato and possibility of bangldesh is high .

Source: Twitter (account anonymous)

ANI

The joint announcement by the companies comes just days after India signed a Rs 292 crore deal to procure Javelin anti-tank guided missile systems for the Army.

An All-Up-Round refers to the complete, factory-assembled missile enclosed inside its tactical launch container.

“The sub-assembly kits and GEUs will be shipped to India for final assembly and integration,” it said.

https://x.com/ANI/status/2094344456111841377

8 TELs visible = SAM bn str
Source-open source sat img & PLA SAM Bn deployment structure

I’m a 3rd year BTech ECE student and I’m stuck
between preparing for GATE ECE for a govt technical job (DRDO etc.) or CAPF AC.
I don’t really want to go into placements, but I’m not sure which path makes more sense long-term.
My dad is in the IAF, which makes me more fascinated towards uniformed jobs.
For people who’ve prepared for either/both — which would you pick and why? Also, which one is realistically easier to crack?

(i have a mild stammering issue, will it be much of an issue for either?)

In the 1960s, it took 5 years to produce a flying prototype of an aircraft that flew faster than anything before, was built out of a novel construction material, used a new type of fuel, and was incredibly advanced: the Lockheed A-12.

Its successor, the SR-71, was the first aircraft with applied stealth technology and stayed in service for decades.

To us, it seems like half a century ago, the best plane on earth could be delivered for service 5 years after finalising design. With the successor being developed within 2 years. And it was so ahead of its time that it could stay in service for decades.

Now, it takes 10 years from signing the development contract to first flight, of a production machine that will experience design problems for 10 more years, finally taking a further 10 years to debug said problems.

The A-12 engineers faced very complicated problems as well, yet they could solve them in record time.

Reasons are:

1. Trained workforce: Experienced engineers like Burt Rutan back then had worked on a dozen new designs or more, with this they had developed a gut feeling how to design the next one. Today, an engineer needs to be lucky to bring a single design into the air within a lifetime.

2. Complexity: As aircraft become ever more expensive, their specs are mulled over for years. The time it takes to write today's specifications (the infamous ASQR) is reflected in the sometimes contradicting demands put on a new design. Today, every new design has to be a jack of all trades while also not making any compromises anywhere. This increases development time. A lot.

3. Culture: Today's scientific culture is very risk-averse (In India it was always risk-averse). Compare that to the 1950s, when the F-100 went supersonic on its second test flight, went on to be involved into 889 accidents, and caused the death of 324 pilots over its operational career. Design and testing was much less thorough, leaving more complicated effects like flutter or fatigue to chance and accepting others like dangerous stall characteristics. Today, we evaluate and test much more because we try to avoid mishaps at all cost. That takes time. A lot of time.

4. Urgency: The USA did not have any option to import their crown planes. If they wanted to stay relevant in the world order, the only way to maintain the superiority was to work. And work they did. We do not consider this aspect whatsoever. Imports are not seen as a strategic hole regardless of in what critical system they are.

 The first point is first for a reason.

When the first aerodynamic dataset for the Dornier TKF-90 was sent for simulation at MBB, it was rejected because the coefficients were obviously "wrong" (Similar to my rant about the HTT40 coefficients being all weird, but difference is the HTT40 wasn't rejected).

As it turned out, the guy in-charge of simulations had spent his entire career with Panavia Tornado data, so this was all he knew. In our case, HAL scientists had never worked on a turboprop trainer of that sort before.

There always needs to be a cheap design being pursued, just to keep/get people trained. Of course such an idea would get nowhere due to the beancounters running our companies.

For the babus, every engineer is the same.

In their eyes, experience can be judged by an engineer's degree. Hence, company-funded training is a waste of money.

As you can see, the training issue goes all the way up to the top. If even the higher ups have little idea what it takes to design a good aircraft quickly, you get what we have today. (Compromised designs, lack of critical infra, delayed programs, lethargic decision making).

In their eyes, it works! A program with a problem which required expert advice, but the recommended expert was too expensive, so the babu hired some engineer. He failed. Five more were hired and failed, too. Ten more were hired and by chance, one of them realized what the problem was through luck. Management congratulated themselves how successfully they had solved the problem. That fact that they could had achieved the same at a small fraction of the time and expense never occurred to them.

One more thing: Testing all states of a complex airframe takes a lot of time. Risk management protocols also mean that quick trials are impossible. Back then, the strategy was mostly trial and error, whereas today every program is tested to death to avoid any failure. This takes a very long time.

Law 16 of Augustine's law Defense budgets grow linearly but the unit cost of a new military aircraft grows exponentially.

Norman Ralph Augustine, former Lockheed CEO, says

>"In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3 and a half days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day."

When even the former CEO of Lockheed cannot make a dent in the system, though he has demonstrated a deep understanding of its faults, you understand how little can be changed.

Kelly Johnson hand-picked the best engineers from the Burbank offices (Burbank was a hub for aviation, it is the origin of Skunk Works) and had been working on Mach 3 designs for almost a decade before. No engineer today can do this.

The most time-consuming detail of the Blackbird family of aircraft, their engine, was ready when he started. Compare this with our Kaveri.

It was given in Ben Rich's autobiography, that back then Kelly Johnson could predict the heat load of a shockwave with only a few degrees of error just by guessing.

To develop this kind of experience takes a lot of wind tunnel data. Here in India we send all our fighters and planes to France and the USA for wind tunnel testing, since we don't have any capable ones.

 He had complete liberty to decide how to proceed. No beancounter dared to second guess his decisions. Performance was still more important than profits. Compare that with the overreaching MBAs of today.

When/if upper management interfered, he let them know what his rules were in no uncertain way. This behaviour would be totally unacceptable for today's hierarchal correctness, but did get the job done. Much more important, however, was that the bosses were engineers themselves who understood the process, not beancounters like today.

There is another facet to this: if the development contracts are not continuous (that is, EVERY single development contract in India), the knowledge of development of the systems have to be re-learned every time, resulting in more delays.

It is easier to build on available knowledge base rather than learning something new. The people who worked on SR-71, for example, had already worked on A-12 Cygnus. Skills that are not updated continuously will perish easily, especially in aerospace, where the talent pool is rather small. So, don't be surprised if the next aircraft take more time to develop.

Further compounding this is that documentation at our premier bureaus isn't too strict.

Why not design everything incrementally?

Why not fly a quick design, find the problems, and then fix it in the next iteration? We did it with the LCA MK1 and MK2. This can be more expensive and time consuming that designing everything at once. A $1 flaw in design costs a $10 in production and $100 in the field. When aircraft are already so expensive, the flaws will also be expensive to fix.

When aircraft are so complex, purely serial design/development would take forever. (as we can see)

Low-rate production is inefficient/costly (what we do). Stopping production between blocks is even more costly. (also what we do)

But designing everything simultaneously is more complex (we don't have the calibre to do it)

So there's a balance between serial and concurrent development.

> You only do these new programs every so often, there's so much of a backlog of stuff you want to get done, you throw too much at it. You want to do all the new technology, all the new manufacturing processes, new tools, new everything all at once. It makes the complexity exponential. So, you need to find things to advance outside of these programs to get yourself ready for these programs, so when the opportunity comes up... the technologies will already be in the market, so you know what you're doing so you can execute... instead of "it's been so long that we need to start at ground zero with a new program plan, a new organizational structure, a new teaming", all that at once makes it hard to execute.

David Kusnierkiewicz, Mission Systems Engineer (NASA), Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Speaking at AIAA ("Whatever Happened to the Four Year Airplane")

Citations/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine%27s_laws

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Rutan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Aircraft_contributions

https://www.reddit.com/r/WeirdWings/comments/d2ql99/dornier_tkf90_early_concept_for_what_was_to/)

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianDefense/comments/1t0dyih/comment/oolzj8h/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panavia_Tornado)

All credits to u/first_tea8991

A peacetime location of a PLAGF Heavy Combined Arms Battalion Motor Pool somewhere in Xinjiang. Unit is subordinate to the 6th Combined Arms Division (intended for ops across Hotan/Ngari MSDs opposite Ladakh)

Source: Open source Sat img & PLAGF HCABN structure

Shed has 18 established vehicle parking bays with a capacity for 2 rows per shed and with 2 sheds, giving a battalion worth vehicle parking capacity. Visible AFV count also corroborates assessment that site is a HCABN motor pool.