UK, India ink Hawk MoU

For pound;795 million, the UK has agreed to provide 66 Hawk Advance Jet Trainers AJTs for the IAF with an assurance of uninterrupted supp...

For pound;795 million, the UK has agreed to provide 66 Hawk Advance Jet Trainers AJTs for the IAF with an assurance of uninterrupted supply of aircraft. It has also said it will not impose any restrictions or prohibitions at any time during the operational life of the aircraft.

After prolonged negotiations, the governments of India and UK today signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding. The entire process took almost 20 years to reach a culmination.

India will acquire 24 trainer jets in a fly-away condition from Britain and will manufacture another 42 at the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited HAL facility. Christened Hawk Mark 132, the first trainer jet will be delivered three years from the day of signing the contract.

In the interim period, 75 pilots will train in England in batches of 25 every year along with pilots of the Royal Air Force in what has been described by British High Commissioner Michael Arthur as a 8216;8216;major joint training programme8217;8217;. The trainer jets will be located at Bidar.

The MoU follows a series of meetings held over the past few weeks following a controversy arising out of the issue of tooling. While HAL insisted British Aerospace pay for the man hours involved in tooling, BAe said the matter had not come up earlier, and in case HAL wanted BAe to do the tooling, they would have to pay. This would have raised the cost by at least 50 million, according to sources.

However, Defence Secretary Ajay Prasad, who signed the MoU for the Government, said it was a 8216;8216;genuine problem in the interpretation8217;8217; of the papers on tooling and that it was sorted out.

The Cabinet Committee on Security had cleared the deal in September last. The contract between BAe and MoD is expected to be inked within a fortnight. India had felt let down by Britain in the wake of the 1998 Pokharan tests when Britain held back supplies of the Sea Harrier aircraft and Seaking helicopters. India managed to get an assurance from Britain through today8217;s MoU that under no circumstances will Britain hold back either the aircraft, supplies or the product support element. The IAF trainees will now benefit from the Hawk and will not jump straight from sub-sonic Kiran mark-II Trainers in stage two training to the supersonic MiG-21 fighters.

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The Hawk will be the trans-sonic link in between the subsonic and supersonic aircraft, a senior IAF official said. According to IAF statistics, of all the fighter crashes, 44 per cent are due to pilot error and this will help check losses.