NEW DELHI: India is now stepping on the gas to develop and induct advanced indigenous airborne early-warning and control (AEW&C) aircraft or "eyes in the sky", which will boost surveillance and detection capabilities along the China and Pakistan borders as well as help direct friendly fighters during air combat with enemy jets.
The DRDO-IAF combine is actively pushing ahead with progammes to develop six Mark-1A as well as six Mark-2 versions of the Netra AEW&C aircraft, three of which were earlier built and inducted from February 2017 onwards.
Sources said defence ministry will next week take up the acceptance of necessity (AoN) for the six Mark-1A aircraft, which will entail mounting active electronically scanned array antenna-based radars, electronic and signal intelligence systems on Embraer jets, at a cost of around Rs 9,000 crore.
"These six AEW&C aircraft will be like the first three Embraer-145 jet-based Netra, which have 240-degree radar coverage. But there will be better software and more advanced technologies like new gallium nitride-based TR (transmit/receive) modules for the radars," a source said.
The developmental work on the six Mark-2 aircraft, with bigger and more capable versions of the AEW&C radars and sensors to be mounted on second-hand Airbus-321 planes bought from Air India, is already at an advanced stage at a cost of Rs 10,990 crore.
"Delivery of the first such AEW&C Mark-2 aircraft, which will also have an antenna in the nose in addition to the main dorsal antenna to give 300-degree radar coverage, should take place in 2026-27. Technologies from the Mark-2 aircraft, in fact, will flow into the Mark-1A ones," the source added.
Both the projects are critical for India because it is lagging far behind Pakistan, let alone China, in the AEW&C and AWACS arena. Apart from the three Netras, IAF only has three Israeli Phalcon AWACS mounted on Russian IL-76 transport aircraft - with 360-degree radar coverage and a 450-km range - that were inducted in 2009-2011 under a $1.1 billion deal.
Pakistan now has 10 Swedish Saab-2000 Erieye AEW&C and Chinese Karakoram Eagle ZDK-03 AWACS aircraft. China has around 30 AEW&C aircraft, including Kong Jing-2000 'Mainring', KJ-200 'Moth' and KJ-500 aircraft.
In a major plus for IAF, the existing Netras and the Phalcons are fully plugged into its integrated air command and control system (IACCS). This fully-automated air defence network with data links is being progressively expanded to integrate the wide array of military radars with each other as well as with civilian radars to plug surveillance gaps in Indian airspace.
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