F-16 proposal for India

From Aviation Week's ARES Blog

There's Life In The Old Girl Yet

Posted by Bill Sweetman at 3/23/2008 11:24 AM CDT

Via the invaluable Secret Projects site comes a brochure on Lockheed Martin's F-16IN proposal to India.

The options list is a mixture of features from the United Arab Emirates' F-16E/F and the Advanced Block 50 that is standard for other export customers. The active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar is the Northrop Grumman APG-80 from the F-16E/F; the company's newly announced Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR) is optimized for retrofits, and unlike the APG-80 does not need added power and cooling.

Also from the E/F are the big-screen glass cockpit and the General Electric F110-GE-132 engine.

However, the F-16IN does not have the E/F's integrated electro-optical system, presumably relying instead on a chin-station targeting pod. The Indian AF can pick the market-leading Rafael Litening - the UAE, for obvious reasons, won't. The F-16IN brochure depicts the VSI Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System, likewise taboo in the UAE. The EW system looks like the ITT ALQ-211(V)4 AIDEWS, selected by Chile and - according to a local press report - Turkey, where it beat a BAE Systems/Aselsan system that the Turkish MoD had invested heavily in.

Lockheed Martin has to overcome the "F-104S" syndrome in order to win the Indian Medium Multi Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) contract: it's a reference to the Italian AF, who bought the last and greatest version of the elegant F-104 back in the mid-1960s and found themselves the sole operator of the type in the 1980s. Like the Gripen crew, they struggle against the Indian operator's perception that single-engine jets are lawn darts.

Lockheed Martin also argues that they have unparalleled experience in license production - F-16s have been license-built in four countries - and that a simple, low-cost fighter makes sense as a complement to the Su-30MKI.