Chandigarh: The Tejas Mk1 Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) crash during a demonstration fight at the Dubai Air Show on Friday (November 21), starkly highlights the uphill task its makers in Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) face in establishing themselves globally as credible combat platform manufacturers.

Unlike established fighter makers like the US’s Lockheed Martin and Boeing, France’s Dassault, Russia’s Sukhoi and MiG, Sweden’s Saab, and China’s Chengdu and Shenyang Aircraft Corporations, HAL has no experience in international sales, yet is now locked in direct competition with these seasoned manufacturers.

In recent years, it made modest progress convincing buyers in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America of Tejas’s reliability and support ecosystem, and in 2022 had even planned a marketing office in Malaysia, which never materialised. But it continued to actively market Tejas, seeking every opportunity to build both the fighter’s credibility and its own in global markets.

But Friday’s crash has abruptly halted that momentum, wiping out many years of marketing gains in an instant. Instead of reinforcing confidence, the incident has reignited old doubts over HAL and Tejas, leaving India’s indigenous fighter’s international prospects in question.

By contrast, other major fighter platforms – such as the US F‑15, F‑16, F‑18, F‑22 and F‑35; France’s Rafale; Sweden’s Gripen; Eurofighter’s Typhoon; and Russia’s Su‑35 and MiG‑35 – benefited from decades of combat experience, extensive export footprints and established maintenance, repair and overhaul support ecosystems.

Their long operational histories have provided both their domestic operators and international customers with a level of confidence and proven reliability that HAL and Tejas remained at least a generation, if not longer, away from achieving.

Tejas’s crash in Dubai brutally highlighted HAL’s central dilemma: air show displays are not mere aerobatic theatre – they are high-stakes tests where a fighter must demonstrate agility, reliability, and maturity before a critical audience of military buyers and analysts.

Thus, a crash during such a demonstration only deepened doubts over the aircraft’s combat readiness, operational robustness and suitability for frontline service.

HAL was unavailable for comment.

Adding to these challenges was Tejas’s fundamental vulnerability: despite being promoted as an indigenous fourth-generation fighter, many of the Mk‑1’s high-value systems – including its US-origin GE F404 IN20 engine, Israeli radar, assorted missile systems, avionics, and electronic warfare (EW) packages – were imported, constraining both its performance and export potential.

This is because HAL is required to secure prior clearances under the export control laws and protocols of all component and sub-assembly suppliers before finalising any export contract, with approvals granted on a case-by-case basis once a customer has been identified.

This gives supplier nations a de facto veto over HAL’s sales, effectively allowing them to influence which countries can buy the aircraft and adding another layer of complexity and uncertainty to Tejas’s international prospects.

The linchpin of these imported subsystems is the GE F404 IN20 afterburning turbofan engine, generating 80-85 kN of thrust and serving as the core of Tejas’s manoeuvrability and overall performance.

In aviation engineering, it is axiomatic that a fighter’s engine is its lifeblood, providing the thrust, speed and agility necessary for air combat, supersonic flight and weapons delivery. Everything else – airframe geometry, weight distribution, aerodynamics, fuel load, payload capacity, take-off performance, climb rate and operational ceiling – is built around the engine’s capabilities, which in turn shape the fighter’s mission effectiveness.

This exposes a critical vulnerability for HAL: the US could at any time block the re-export of the GE F404 IN20-powered Tejas to potential international customers, while Israel and other supplier nations too could restrict the ELTA EL/M-2052 radar, missile systems and other key components, giving them effective control over who can acquire the aircraft worldwide.

Even after delivery, buyers could face hurdles, as routine maintenance, spares supply and capability upgrades may yet again require supplier approvals, complicating lifecycle planning.

For a fighter touted as the world’s lightest fourth-generation platform, competing in the same weight and price segment as Sweden’s Gripen, this uncertainty would further undermine Tejas’s marketability.

Concurrently, Tejas’s formidable multi-origin weapons inventory – a mix of indigenous and foreign systems designed to enhance battlefield versatility – also has the potential to introduce multiple layers of external approvals, export controls and long-term support uncertainties.

While the indigenous Astra Mk-1 provides Tejas with a credible beyond-visual-range capability, its broader armament inventory spans multiple regulatory jurisdictions. This includes Israeli I-Derby and Python-5 air-to-air missiles, MBDA’s advanced short-range air-to-air missiles, French Hammer guided munitions, Boeing’s joint direct attack munition kits, Israeli Griffin laser-guided bombs and Russia’s Kh-59 stand-off missiles. The aircraft is also equipped with an internal Russian-origin 23 mm GSh-23 twin-barrel cannon.

According to official HAL figures, 59.7% of the Tejas Mk-1’s value by cost is considered indigenous, while the remaining 40.3% comes from imported systems.

When measured by the number of line replaceable units (LRUs) – self-contained modules that can be swapped out for maintenance – the aircraft has 210 indigenous LRUs and 134 imported ones, meaning that 75.5% of its components by quantity are domestic.

And though a majority of Tejas’s components are locally produced, the higher-cost imported systems account for a disproportionately large share of the aircraft’s overall value. Despite HAL’s frequent claims of indigenisation, this numerical advantage conceals a harder truth: many imported LRUs – such as the GE F404-IN20 engine, Israeli radar, missile systems, avionics, EW suites and key cockpit instruments including the ejection seat – are high-value and strategically critical.

By both cost and strategic impact, these imported components disproportionately determined  the fighter’s price, performance and export potential – yet HAL downplays their significance, presenting Tejas as largely indigenous while it remains heavily dependent on foreign technology.

Some independent analyses, such as those by the Observer Research Foundation, estimate a slightly lower indigenous content by value – around 53.5% – reflecting methodologies that account for raw materials and imported subsystems.

But then again, regardless of the exact figure, all assessments unequivocally confirm one reality: Tejas remains dependent on foreign-made systems for its most critical functions like flying, navigating, sensing and fighting.

However, looking ahead, the Tejas Mk-1A variant currently undergoing flight trials is expected to feature the locally developed Uttam active electronically scanned array radar, advanced EW warfare suites and upgraded avionics, replacing some of the MK-1’s imported systems.

Nonetheless, until these upgrades are fully realised, high-cost imported components remain a limiting factor in operational flexibility, maintenance and international sales.

Meanwhile, a cross-section of HAL insiders privately conceded that the defence public sector undertaking (DPSU) had developed a degree of institutional hubris and complacency, fuelled by assured government patronage and a steady stream of orders from the Indian military that had boosted its revenues and propelled its impressive stock market performance.

With a large and growing order pipeline worth thousands of crores – including 180 Tejas variants, 156 Prachanda light combat helicopters, smaller trainer aircraft and major upgrade programmes for the Mirage-2000H, MiG-29 and Su-30MKI fleets – critics argue that HAL continues to operate in a largely “protected and unaccountable environment”, where quality control, cost competitiveness and delivery timelines face no scrutiny expected of a 21st-century aerospace manufacturer.

HAL veterans said successive senior managements had been slow to recognise that international markets judge equipment not on patriotic sentiment but on performance, reliability and user confidence.

“Abroad, praise from ministries counts for little,” said a former HAL employee, declining to be named. Customers trust deployment records, not endorsements, and the Dubai Tejas crash served as a blunt reminder that global competition demands professional competence, he added.

Some went even further, calling HAL’s newfound confidence “misplaced”. They noted that despite decades of domestic orders, HAL’s performance record with its principal customer, the Indian Air Force, was abysmal, with senior officers repeatedly flagging persistent delays, uneven quality standards and sluggish progress in indigenisation.

“Such concerns inevitably shaped international perceptions, since prospective buyers closely watched how a manufacturer’s home user evaluated its products and services,” added the aforementioned official.

These included recent, derisory references to HAL by Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh, who publicly expressed his frustration with the DPSU on the Tejas programme.

“At the moment, I am just not confident of HAL, which is a very wrong thing to happen,” he declared earlier this year at the Binneal Air Show in Bengaluru, highlighting delays and shortcomings in Tejas’s development and delivery.

The air force chief also highlighted wider issues, questioning why HAL would commit to multiple projects it could not deliver on schedule. He also emphasised the IAF's deep dissatisfaction with HAL’s overall reliability and competence.

In conclusion, the Tejas crash in Dubai severely exposed the harsh reality: no defence customer will risk hundreds of millions of dollars on a fighter that fails spectacularly before them. The incident also tore away any remaining faith in HAL and cast a long, unignorable shadow over India’s ambitions in the global fighter market.

It also brought to the fore a wider truth that India’s quest for aerospace export success cannot rely on patriotic branding, political cover or a protected monopoly. Tejas now competes against platforms proven in combat, backed by mature supply chains and international service records, and unless HAL can demonstrate reliability, accountability and on-time delivery, exporting it would remain an uphill struggle, regardless of how the compliant media tries to soften the blow or frame Friday’s incident in Dubai with an optimistic spin.

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