Chandigarh: The loss of two Indian Air Force (IAF) aircraft in accidents, within hours of each other last week, yet again highlights enduring issues related to its aging platform profile and grave challenges posed by their overall maintenance, repair and overhaul.
The accidented aircraft included an Anglo-French SEPECAT Jaguar ground attack fighter that crashed last Friday (March 7) whilst on a routine flight near its base at Ambala, and a twin-engine turboprop Soviet-era Antonov An-32 ‘Cline’ transporter, which crash-landed soon after at the Bagdogra airport in north Bengal.
The respective pilots and the An-32 crew escaped unhurt, and the IAF announced official inquiries into the accidents, which would take an extended period to determine fault.
Both the IAFs Jaguar and An-32 fleets are decades old, with the former inducted into service in 1979 onwards and the latter commissioned into the IAF five years later in 1984, as the Soviet Union’s first overseas customer for these transporters, designed and series-built by the Antonov Design Bureau in Ukraine, then a part of the USSR.
But over time, the two aircraft types were beset not only by their vintage but also by spare parts shortages and consequential issues of demanding upkeep.
This, in turn, had resulted in the low operational serviceability of barely 50-60% for the two platforms.
Official sources said the twin-engine Jaguar IS/IB/IM variants, of which the IAF currently operates six squadrons totalling around 120 platforms, from Ambala, Jamnagar and Gorakhpur, had reportedly been involved in around 50 minor and major accidents after joining service 46 years ago.
One such recent mishap, before last Friday’s, had resulted in an experienced fighter pilot’s death in Gujarat’s Kutch region in mid-2018, whilst on a regular scheduled sortie.
IAF world’s only major air force that still flies Jaguars
It’s worth recalling that the IAF is the world’s only major air force that still operates Jaguars, the majority of which were licence-built by the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited under a transfer of technology from SEPECAT, a joint venture between France’s Breguet and the British Aircraft Corporation.
Britain, Ecuador, France, Oman and Nigeria had retired them long ago, with some Jaguars on display in air museums in some of these countries.
The IAF too, for its part, is expected to begin ‘number-plating’ or phasing out its older Jaguars 2027-28 onwards, further exacerbating its continuing calamity centred on the drawdown of its fighter squadrons from a sanctioned strength of 42.5 to just 30 squadrons presently.
These numbers were likely to imminently decline further to 28 combat squadrons over the next 12-18 months after two squadrons of legacy upgraded MiG-21 ‘Bis’ ground attack fighters – that first joined service in the mid-1960s – are retired.
Many of these earlier accidents and mishaps involving Jaguars were linked to engine failure, as the Jaguar’s Rolls Royce-Turbomeca Adour Mk811/821 power packs were widely considered by analysts and IAF veterans to be underpowered.
A long-planned IAF project, lasting nearly a decade, to ‘re-engine’ the Jaguars with the US’s Honeywell F-125IN turbofan power packs, capable of providing the fighters greater thrust to enable them to carry a heavier payload, was scrapped in August 2019 due to high costs.
Subsequently, the Jaguar spares crunch became so acute that the IAF acquired some surplus airframes alongside large numbers of assorted parts, sub-assemblies and a even handful of engines from France, Oman and the UK to keep the fighters operational, as they comprised a critical component of the Force’s deep-strike capability.
This included interdiction and close air support operations through the employment of their US-origin Textron CBU-105 Sensor Fused Weapons acquired in 2010 and MBDA Advanced Short-Range Air-to-Air Missiles imported from France in 2014.
But more critically, Jaguars remain essential to India’s triad of land, air and sea-launched strategic weapons which collectively comprise its nuclear deterrence capability. The fighters were believed to have been ‘hard-wired’ for carrying and delivering nuclear bombs, with their avionics suites and radar systems significantly upgraded to enable precision bombing.
Attempts to upgrade India’s An-32s have stalled due to conflict in Ukraine
Meanwhile, it was not immediately known whether the An-32 that crashed at Bagdogra had been upgraded in Ukraine under the $400 million deal in 2008 to retrofit the transporters’ engines, avionics, navigation and communication equipment.
Earlier, an An-32 had crashed over the Bay of Bengal in 2016 whilst operating a courier flight from Tambaram in Tamil Nadu to the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, in which 29 service personnel, including its four-man crew and eight civilians, had died.
The transporter’s debris was never recovered, despite one of the largest-ever missions mounted by the Indian Navy and the Indian Coast Guard to locate it. Only in January last year did an autonomous underwater vehicle locate debris identified as probably belonging to the aircraft.
Three years later, in mid-2019, another An-32 had crashed in Arunachal Pradesh’s mountainous region, killing all 13 service personnel on board.
The An-32 upgrade project, involving 100-odd platforms, was aimed at keeping the ageing transports operational for another 15-20 years, by modifying their cockpit layout, reducing noise and vibration levels and easing overall maintainability issues.
However, this programme, being executed by Antonov in Ukraine, stalled in 2014 after 40 An-32s had been upgraded, as Russia refused to supply Kyiv with critical navigation, communication and on-board oxygen generating kits following a breakdown of ties between the two sides over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.
Consequently, Ukraine developed alternatives to the Russian-made systems and in early 2019 transferred them to the IAF for fitment onto the An-32s at its Base Repair Depot in Kanpur. And though work on the upgrade resumed some months later it, remains far from complete for several An-32s as soon after Ukraine was plunged into war with Russia and unable to complete its commitment to the transport aircraft retrofit.
Last week’s crashes caused by IAF’s running outmoded platforms: vets
A cross-section of senior IAF veterans said that these two aircraft crashes were a ‘direct consequence’ of the Force continuing to operate outmoded platforms like Jaguars and An-32s, way beyond their use and sell-by date.
Alongside, the ‘unhurried’ endeavours by the IAF and successive governments to replace them, despite the serious security threat posed by India’s collusive nuclear-armed rivals China and Pakistan, only magnified the problem.
A former three-star IAF fighter pilot said that the steady numerical depletion of the IAF’s combat force, to its lowest levels presently, had reached ‘emergency proportions’, which Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh had repeatedly stressed but to no avail.
And, unless this was redressed speedily on a war footing, he warned, declining to be named for fear of repercussions, the IAF would simply be left in the lurch.
Retired Air Vice Marshal Arjun Subramaniam concurred. Writing in The Tribune on March 7, he stated that the IAF was presently at an “inflection point” concerning its combat capability and with bleak hope of redressal.
“On the one hand, it [the IAF] has articulated a doctrine that is sweeping in its scope and ambitious in its aspiration”, he declared, “but on the other the gap between its articulation and the capability to execute [it] is growing ever so wide”.
This gap, the two-star fighter pilot and military historian cautioned, merited “serious examination” of the erosion in the IAFs offensive capabilities, with accountability and clear deliverables, which unfortunately had so far proven elusive.
