Designed and developed by HAL, "the aircraft was flown by Group Capt C Subramaniam and Group Captain Venugopal for about 15 minutes around 09.15am in the clouded skies," said an official.
The inaugural flight of India's indigenous HTT 40, the Basic Trainer Aircraft (BTA) went on successfully at Bengaluru's Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) airport on Friday, marking a milestone.
Come 2018 and the rookie pilots of the Indian Air Force (IAF) can look forward to training on them.
Designed and developed by HAL, "the aircraft was flown by Group Capt C Subramaniam and Group Captain Venugopal for about 15 minutes around 09.15am in the clouded skies," said an official.
In doing that, HTT 40 has come out of some thick cloud too. The IAF had been raising apprehensions over the HTT-40's quality and made it amply known. It preferred the Swiss Pilatus PC-7 Mark II trainers over the indigenous development. But persistence from HAL and support from government resulted in the defence PSU investing more than Rs 300 crore to construct a platform for manufacturing HTT 40.
IAF is looking to build up an inventory of 181 trainers even as 59 Pilatus PC-7 aircraft from Switzerland have already been inducted and 38 more of them are in the process of being procured. In total, 68 of HTT 40 aircraft are to be procured from HAL to replace the ageing fleet of basic trainer aircraft in the IAF fleet.
Defence minister Manohar Parrikar who was present to witness the inaugural flight said that "the young team has taken a calculated risk and they have flown the aircraft within one year and kept their assurance."
The indigenous content on HTT-40 is close to 80%. Almost 50% of the components on HTT-40 are manufactured by private players of the Indian aerospace ecosystem.
HAL CMD T. Suvarna Raju said, "The project will now go in full throttle as we aim to get the aircraft certified in 2018."
HAL completed the detailed design phase of HTT 40 in May 2015 and from there it has taken one year to fly the first prototype.
Of the many firsts, the aircraft has a real time systems clash analyses system and complete glass cockpit.
HTT-40's role includes basic flying training, aerobatics, instrument flying, navigation, night flying and close aircraft defence formation in air. It will be used in the first stage training of rookie pilots even as the other HAL made indigenous aircraft trainer Kiran completed 50 years of its service in the IAF last year. HTT 40 has a provision for role expansion to include weapons for the trainer aircraft.
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