LIGHT COMBAT AIRCRAFT (LCA) TEJAS & LCA MK-1A 

CategoryDefence

Last Updated09/01/2022

Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) expects to deliver all Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas.
It will done in the Final Operational Clearance (FOC) variant to Indian Air Force (IAF) in 2022.
Also, LCA MK-1A, with specific enhancements, will take flight by middle of this year.

It is a single-engine multirole light combat aircraft.
Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) programme was started by the Government of India in 1984 when they established the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) to manage the LCA programme.
LCA Tejas was designed and developed by India’s HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited).
It replaced the ageing Mig 21 fighter planes.
It is the second supersonic fighter jet that was developed by HAL (the first one being HAL HF-24 Marut).
It is the lightest and smallest multi-role supersonic fighter aircraft in its class.
It is designed to carry a range of air-to-air, air-to-surface, precision-guided, and standoff weaponry.

Tejas Trainer: 2-seater operational conversion trainer for training air force pilots.
LCA Navy: Twin- and single-seat carrier-capable for the Indian Navy. However, the Navy has declared that the Tejas is too heavy for it to be operational from aircraft carriers (like INS Vikrant, INS Vikramaditya, etc.)
LCA Tejas AF MK2: This is an improvement over the LCA Tejas Mk1 with a higher thrust engine.
LCA Tejas Navy MK2: This is phase 2 of the LCA Navy variant.

Light Combat Aircraft Mk-1A variant is an indigenously designed, developed and manufactured state-of-the-art modern 4+ generation fighter aircraft.
Tejas LCA Mk-1A will be superior over previous variants of LCA Tejas, in terms of avionics, performance, and weapons capabilities.
This aircraft is equipped with critical operational capabilities of Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) Radar, Beyond Visual Range (BVR) Missile, Electronic Warfare (EW) Suite and Air to Air Refuelling (AAR).
LCA Tejas Mk-1A will be flexible enough for hardware and software integration that would be required to fire different types of Beyond Visual Range (BVR), which are available in the inventory of the Indian Air Force (IAF).
It is the first “Buy (Indian-Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured)” category procurement of combat aircrafts with an indigenous content of 50% which will progressively reach 60% by the end of the programme.

Tejas enables IAF to handle repairs or servicing at their base depot so that the turnaround time would get reduced for mission-critical systems.
This would enable IAF to sustain the fleet more efficiently and effectively due to the availability of repair infrastructure at respective bases.
It will give a further push to Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative and boost indigenization of defence production and the defence industry in the country.

LIGHT COMBAT AIRCRAFT (LCA) TEJAS & LCA MK-1A&nbsp;