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Indian Navy's LCA Tejas successfully launched with four missiles

The supersonic combat aircraft was carrying two Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air Missiles (BVRAAAM) and two Close Combat Missiles (CCM).

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The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) successfully launched the naval version of India's indigenous Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas on Friday from the Shore Based Test Facility INS Hansa in Goa. The supersonic combat aircraft was carrying two Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air Missiles (BVRAAAM) and two Close Combat Missiles (CCM).

While the BVRAAMs carried by the LCA Navy was Derby from Israel, the CCM was the Russian R-73. Indian Navy and Indian Air Force (IAF) has the Israeli Derby BVRAAM in their arsenal and the Tejas developed for the air force has already test-fired and integrated the missile.

Tweeting the photo of the LCA Navy Tejas taking off from the ski-jump at SBTF INS Hansa, the DRDO called it "one more step in launch capability expansion for LCA Navy." Indian Navy aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, the only one of the arsenal currently,  has ski-jumps to assist fighters take-off from the warship.

 

 

 

The LCA Navy Tejas had on September 29, 2019, successfully launched and made an arrested landing in a single sortie at the SBTF INS Hansa, revealing its progress towards a full-fledged and indigenous carrier-based fighter. The Ministry of Defence had called the launch and landing "a seminal achievement". "Being a pioneering technology acquisition and demonstration program for the unique Short Take-Off but Arrested Recovery (STOBAR) concept of aircraft operations, the LCA (Navy) team has had to conceptualise and experiment with complex software modes from a clean slate. All this had to be done while tentatively exploring and incrementally expanding the structural capabilities of the aircraft to withstand the brutal requirements of carrier operations."

"The exploratory nature of this stage of the programme necessitates experimentation with multiple software options and hardware configurations. These include multiple configurations of aerodynamic surfaces, different flight control strategies, avionics tools, and display symbols to ease the piloting task, multiple iterations to the “mechanicals” (dampers/structural members/contact points), etc," the statement added.

The IAF had test-fired the Tejas for the first time more than two years ago, on May 12, 2017, at the Interim Test Range (ITR) at Chandipur in Odisha. The missile, defence sources say, is an active radar air-to-air missile that can be launched to annihilate a target, whether in the daytime or nighttime conditions across weather conditions.

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