Posted on 08/25/2009 9:08:42 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Navy grounds Sea Harrier fleet after crash
TNN 26 August 2009, 01:23am IST
NEW DELHI: Navy has grounded its Sea Harrier fighters, which operate from the country's solitary aircraft carrier INS Viraat, as a precautionary measure after one of the jump-jets crashed last Friday.
Sources said the Sea Harrier fleet, which is down to just eight single-seat fighters and three twin-seater trainers now, will undergo systematic checks to ascertain whether a "technical defect'' caused the crash off Goa, which killed the pilot, Lt-Commander Saurabh Chandra Saxena.
Apart from the acute shortfall in the number of fighters to operate from the 28,000-tonne INS Viraat, the worry is that the Sea Harrier-IN 622 which crashed was a newly-upgraded one.
Though Navy is conducting a "board of inquiry'' into the mishap, the absence of a cockpit voice recorder or flight data recording system on the ill-fated fighter will make the probe all the more difficult.
From 1983 onwards, Navy had inducted 30 British-origin Sea Harriers, which take off from the angled ski-jump on INS Viraat and land vertically on its deck, but has lost over half of them in accidents.
The remaining underwent "a limited upgrade'' in a Rs 477-crore project, which includes fitting of Israeli Elta EL/M-2032 multi-mode fire control radars and Derby beyond visual range air-to-air missiles, at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.
So, even as the 50-year-old INS Viraat is finally getting ready to become operational for at least five years more after an 18-month life-extension refit, it is fast running out of jets to operate from its deck.
This clearly spells trouble for Navy, which has been crying hoarse for several years now that it wants at least two aircraft carriers to protect India's strategic interests.
But successive governments have miserably failed to take decisions in time. The 44,570-tonne Admiral Gorshkov, undergoing a refit at the Sevmash Shipyard in North Russia, for instance, will be available only by 2013. The 40,000-tonne indigenous aircraft carrier (IAC), being built at Cochin Shipyard, will also be ready only by 2015-2016.
Navy, of course, will soon start getting the 16 MiG-29Ks contracted in the original $1.5-billion Gorshkov package deal signed with Russia in January 2004, under which the carrier refit was pegged at $974 million.
India and Russia, however, are still enmeshed in renegotiating Gorshkov's final refit cost, with Moscow demanding as much as $2.9 billion and India keen on shelling out around $2.2 billion.
The acquisition of another 29 MiG-29Ks for around Rs 5,380 crore is also on the cards, especially since both Gorshkov and IAC will require these fighters when they are ready to enter service.
VTOL will always be a hard, hard technology.
It is close to Helicopters: they don’t fly, they just beat the air into submission.
When you ask a lot of a little, don’t be surprised if there is an occasional failure.
/mark
So I was asking myself “what is the fighter at the top?”
Then I check the image URL and said “YAY ME!” I can usually identify an Hornet when I see one :)
I will go even as far as to say that is an older Hornet and not the SuperHornet that is pretty much in use today.
And, dang, I miss the F-14!
Can’t see intakes but based upon size alone, I believe you are correct re: Hornet. The Indian Sea Harriers also look like earlier versions and not the McDonnell-Douglas AV-8B Harrier II models that the Marine Corps and RAF fly (actually the Brits fly a BAE-built variant).
Here's a good look at the INS Viraat, showing the angled forward flight deck for launching aircraft. She's a lot smaller than American aircraft carriers (743 feet long, displacing 23,900 tons), and was originally built in the 1950s as HMS Hermes. She participated in the Falkland Islands campaign in the 1980s before being sold to India. The ship is 50 years old, and the Harriers she carries are around 25 years old.
The F-14’s were cool.
The IN purchased a handful of Sea Harriers in the 90s. And there are about 10-14 British Sea Harriers in cold storage.
The IN operates the British built Sea Harriers FRS-1 variants.
I remember from the 90s was that McDonnell-Douglas built the Harrier better so the British bought ours.
Back to basics; you can cross a rock with a hawk, and get a wort hot. You can cross a rotary wing concept with a hawk, and get a Harrier.
No one liked A 10 for a long time, the hype qas great, the ship was un flyable. A10 grew into its mission caus the platform was over designed understanding that the mission would largely exceed original specs. Helpfull that technology was never a real prob.
Harrier tries to fly on the hope that technology will finde it. Sometimes theirs a bridge to far.
Rab
But the harriers took out the Argie Mirages pretty well, didn’t they?
parsy, who knows nothing
It’s a Super Hornet from VFA-102. Even if you can’t see the intake you can tell from the size of the lex.
ping
fyi, helicopters do not beat the air, they actually fly.
take a real good look at a helicopter blade, it is actually shaped like an airfoil aka airplane wing.
the rotor generates relative airspeed over the airfoil and voila, you get lift from the airfoil while the rotor overpowers the drag
And you'd be wrong.
And you'd be wrong.
These doggone (probably commie) eyeglass wipes did it to me AGAIN?
It's a S/H after all? I (again using my aging eyeballs) seem to see the S/H as more elongated, from cockpit to jets.
But you can't negate my love of the Tomcat, even though VG was a great idea whose time has passed :)
What a beautiful craft!
Hey thanks for helping me through it.
I am the biggest fan of milcraft and the more I learn, the more I learn (lol).
God gave me the funniest set of thoughts: Love of milcraft and fear of heights. But I do fly domestic a lot ( + 2 million miles). But if you were to put me in a milcraft I suspect I would faint.
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