Defence Minister Rajnath Singh's Maiden Sortie on Tejas LCA in Bengaluru

Bengaluru: Defence Minister Rajnath Singh undertook a maiden sortie on a Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), fully dressed in a G-Suit, from Bengaluru on Thursday. Singh, who became the first Defence Minister of the country to fly in a Tejas, took to the cockpit of the fighter jet with a pilot in the front seat. “Singh is the first Raksha Mantri (Defence Minister) to fly the LCA. National Flight Test Centre Director Air-Vice Marshal N. Tiwari piloted the fourth-generation fighter trainer, with the 68-year-old Singh behind him in the glass cockpit,” a Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) told here.

The fighter jet, a twin-seater trainer aircraft, took off from the airport of the state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) in this tech hub for a 30-minute sortie at 9.58 a.m under a cloudy sky. A senior IAF officer and a ground staff at the airport guided Rajnath Singh in taking the rear seat inside the cockpit ensuring all safety gear were in place. Singh waved out to the crowds at the HAL airport before the fighter jet took to the runway.

Shortly before entering the cockpit, Rajnath posted his photographs dressed in a G-suit on Twitter. “All Set for the Day,” he tweeted. On Wednesday, Singh had left for Bengaluru to participate in the program that has been jointly organized by the HAL and the DRDO. Singh’s maiden flight on the Tejas comes ahead of the Indian Air Force (IAF) placing an order for 83 jets with the HAL, the manufacturer of the 4-plus generation combat aircraft.

In the first week of September, the pricing-related issue of the 83 jets, which had been hanging fire for long, had been successfully resolved by the Department of Defence Production with the HAL. The Tejas has been designed by India’s premier defence research institute, the Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO). Singh made a familiarization sortie to get acquainted with the air prowess of the indigenous fighter. “Before take-off, the 45 Squadron Flying Daggers of the Indian Air Force (IAF) briefed Singh about the LCA’s avionics, controls and radar in the glass cockpit and the weapons it carries for strike power. The squadron is based at the Sulur airbase near Coimbatore in southern Tamil Nadu.

Tejas is a single-engine, delta wing, multi-role fighter, designed and developed by the city-based Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) of the DRDO and built by the aerospace behemoth Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL). With final operational clearance (FoC), the IAF has inducted 16 weaponized LCAs into its combat fleet since June 2018 after its pilots validated its earlier version with initial operational clearance (IoC) by the military aviation regulator Cemilac here in December 2013. In the past, former defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman flew in a Sukhoi-30 MKI fighter of the IAF on January 17, 2008, from Jodhpur airbase in Rajasthan. She was also the first woman Raksha Mantri to fly in a fighter as a “co-pilot. (IANS)

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