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Journalism of Courage
In an effort to extricate itself from the prohibitively high costs of equipment in the international arms market, the Navy has begun to look within. And not without success.
Following a report on May 11 last year in The Indian Express about a team of young IIT-Kanpur graduates making a mark in the country’s guided missile programme, Naval Headquarters hired the services of the same group to fix a fundamental flaw in how warships “talk” to helicopters.
The team recently went on board aircraft carrier INS Viraat and proved equal to the challenge.
The Navy’s fleet of Kamov-31 airborne early warning (AEW) helicopters, one of its prime force multipliers, cannot effectively operate off all Naval warships — apart from the three Talwar-class stealth frigates — because of the absence of a crucial but expensive Russian navigational computer called the Elman system.
The IIT graduates, part of an incubation outfit at IIT-Kanpur called Whirlybird Electronics, were invited on board INS Viraat during the Indo-French Naval exercise Varuna in March. The team then put to the test its equipment, called NELM (an inside joke for “Not-Elman”), or technically as shipborne inertial aligment & transfer unit.
Of 15 communication tests conducted between the aircraft carrier and a Kamov-31 helicopter, NELM passed 14. The error was described as a “planned error of limits.”
Now the Naval project manager, Cdr C Raghuram, has asked the IIT team led by aerospace engineering graduate Bhrah Dutt Awasthi to fine-tune their device and bring it back in four months.
“The project was initiated by the Navy chief’s scientific advisor B Lalmohan in coordination with the Weapons & Electronic System Engineering Establishment (WESEE), and is now in progress,” a Naval spokesperson said. A helicopter on a ship does not have independent means to read the ship’s own course and other parameters and requires this vital link at all times, in order to perform as a sophisticated early warning system.
“We have created a clone of the Elman through 100 per cent back-computing and reverse engineering. In four months, we will take back a fully operational product for further testing,” Awasthi told The Indian Express from Kanpur. The Navy soon wants to use early-warning helicopters to be used across the fleet.
