Chandigarh: The unfortunate crash on Friday (November 21) of a Tejas LCA Mk1 at the Dubai Air Show, in which its pilot died during a demonstration flight, could not have occurred at a more critical moment for India’s aerospace ambitions.

The single-engine, fourth-generation fighter was performing at one of the world’s premier defence trade showcases, where Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), its manufacturer, and the Indian Air Force (IAF) had been aggressively pitching the indigenous platform to potential buyers across the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Worse still, this was not Tejas’s first accident.

In March 2024, an IAF Tejas Mk1 had crashed near Jaisalmer during a routine training sortie – thankfully without loss of life – making Dubai the second recorded LCA accident in a programme that has logged over 12,000 fleet flying hours since its maiden test flight in 2001.

But for a new fighter seeking export credibility, two crashes within 20 months inevitably raise obvious questions about product reliability and safety, irrespective of the eventual technical findings that will emerge weeks, if not months later from formal investigations into the Dubai accident.

But the high-visibility accident, witnessed in real time by the global aerospace community and military reporters, was not merely an ill-fated operational mishap – it was a strategic commercial setback, raising uncomfortable questions about Tejas’s reliability, quality control, competence and readiness to break into the hyper-competitive global fighter market.

The smaller air forces of Asia, Africa and Latin America, which HAL is targeting, operate with limited procurement budgets and prioritise performance assurance, life-cycle costs, after-sales support and – critically – crash histories.

Hence, a frontline fighter that crashes on a global stage sends a stark and unavoidable signal of unreliability, irrespective of the eventual official reason behind the accident. In the unforgiving and ruthlessly competitive global defence market, buyers are least bothered about explanations, technical details, engineering clarifications or official statements; all they care about is safety and confidence, and right now Tejas is not merely struggling to project that image – it has effectively lost it.

And this is precisely why the Dubai crash is more than a public relations embarrassment – it threatens to deepen a credibility gap that HAL has been struggling hard to close.

For, despite improvements in production capacity and greater political backing, even the IAF’s senior leadership has continued to express unease with HAL. At Aero India 2025 in Bengaluru, Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh publicly declared that the IAF had ‘no confidence’ in HAL and that the company was ‘just not in mission mode’.

Singh noted that HAL had committed to delivering 11 Tejas Mk-1A fighters to the IAF by February, yet “not a single one [was] ready” at the time of his review. The ACM's challenge to HAL went beyond mere schedule slippage: he pointed to a persistent pattern of the public sector company over-promising without the delivery discipline needed for a modern aerospace programme.

Put simply: if HAL is unable to assure the IAF about timely production, quality and consistency, the fallout from the Dubai crash could be far more devastating globally than just a momentary PR hit.

Besides, in a competitive environment where Chinese fighters like JF-17s, J-10s and J-31s and others from countries like Sweden were economically priced and aggressively marketed, Tejas could not afford a reputational setback like the one at Dubai.

And even though the crash does not undo the Tejas’s multiple technical and operational merits, perception in the sphere of defence aerospace dominates and, in instances like at Dubai, can effectively demolish a product long before the engineering does.

Meanwhile, for HAL, the Tejas crash inevitably revives memories of an earlier disastrous export venture: the sale of its seven Dhruv Advanced Light Helicopters (ALHs) to Ecuador in 2008-2009 for $42.5 million, of which four crashed. These crashes eventually led to the Ecuador Air Force (EAF) terminating its ALH contract with HAL in October 2015, in a major setback to what was then the first ever major export of an indigenous military platform.

At the time, Ecuadorian defence minister Fernando Cordero had told reporters in the capital Quito that two of these four crashes were due to ‘mechanical failure’, and that the remaining three Dhruvs had subsequently been grounded by the EAF.

HAL for its part countered those claims by maintaining that ‘human error’ and poor maintenance by the EAF was responsible for two of the four Dhruv crashes.

The first Dhruv had crashed in Ecuador soon after its delivery to the EAF in 2009 whilst making a low pass at a military parade in Quito, while the second accident occurred in February 2014, killing three of four people on board.

These were followed by two back-to-back crashes within a fortnight of each other in early January 2015, which ultimately decided the EAF against continuing to operate the ALHs.

Conversely, HAL, which had completed Dhruv deliveries to Ecuador by 2012, contested Quito’s claims that it had failed to ship helicopter spares to the EAF on schedule. A HAL spokesman at the time had maintained that the Dhruv’s service and maintenance were ‘exclusively’ the EAF’s responsibility, as the 24-month warranty period for it to provide after-sales service support for the seven ALHs had expired.

But he did concede that HAL was ‘more than willing’ to offer the EAF ‘all and any’ assistance that it required to keep the remaining three Dhruvs operational, a proposal Quito summarily rejected and scrapped the deal.

The termination of the ALH buy by the EAF was, without doubt, a serious stumbling block for HAL in a field where flight safety remains the primary concern, and where stiff competition from established Western helicopter manufacturers in the US and Europe,endured.

In early 2022 the then-HAL head C.B. Ananthakrishnan had optimistically claimed that countries like Argentina, the Philippines and Egypt were interested in acquiring ALH and its Light Combat Helicopter derivative. But all overseas enthusiasm for procuring Dhruv evaporated after an ALH ‘Rudra’ multi-role Weapon Systems Integrated Mk III crashed in Arunachal later that year.

Following the Dubai crash, a cross-section of IAF veterans and analysts argued that if HAL wanted to prevent the incident from snowballing into another Ecuador-style narrative, it needed to move swiftly and transparently – issuing credible accident reporting, demonstrating accountability, reinforcing flight safety procedures and proactively showcasing Tejas’s operational safety record.

Only then, they said, could HAL hope to contain the commercial and reputational fallout – but even that would be a ‘tough call’ in a market where confidence is hard-won and easily lost.

But India is not the first country to lose a fighter during a public display. Russian, US, European and even Chinese manufacturers have suffered similar air-show losses – sometimes in far more spectacular fashion. But the fundamental difference is that these established aerospace powers possess decades of user trust, combat history, export success and institutional credibility. HAL does not yet enjoy that cushion of reputation – and it simply cannot afford the perception that history, especially the Dhruv-Ecuador experience, is repeating itself.

Looking at it optimistically, Dubai could become a turning point rather than a tombstone – if HAL responds with transparency, speed, professionalism and openness, and treats this accident as an opportunity to demonstrate credibility under pressure.

But to belabour an earlier observation, the global fighter market is unforgiving, ruled not by sentiment or sympathy, but by faith and confidence. If HAL manages the post-crash narrative with clarity and competence, it can strengthen Tejas’s export positioning and signal that India is engineering its way into the major league.

If not, the incident risks hardening a narrative the Indian aerospace industry has spent over a decade trying to erase – one of an ambitious sector still struggling to find a niche in global military aviation.

The Dubai Tejas crash has left HAL’s ambitions grounded and its reputation hanging by a thread.

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