Lease or perish

Lt Gen. B.S. Pawar (retd)

The Army Aviation Corps, the youngest arm of the Indian Army, will celebrate its 38th Raising Day on 1 November 2023. The journey of last 37 years plus with respect to its growth and modernisation has been a mixed one. While the combat potential has increased manifold and is on an upswing, the reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities have taken a major hit. The non-replacement of its accident prone, ageing and obsolete Chetak/ Cheetah fleet continues to be the biggest challenge and bottleneck the Corps faces in its modernisation drive—two decades of concerted efforts to acquire a suitable state of the art helicopter for replacement has not yielded any results, thanks to our flawed acquisition system/ process.

The armed forces, especially the army over the last two years, have been raising the red flag with the government about the Cheetah/ Chetak fleet reaching the end of their total technical life by 2023 end and the need to fast track their replacement but to no avail. The final blow to this replacement process has come with the ongoing replacement project involving the Russian Ka-226T Light Helicopter. The project is now as good as dead because of a number of reasons, the prime being the western sanctions against Russia—the French Turbomeca engines fitted on the Ka-226T are no longer available and the original Russian engines are under powered.

As a result, the Army Aviation will continue to operate these vintage and unmaintainable machines which continue to fall out of the sky at regular intervals, the latest being the fatal accident of a Cheetah helicopter in March this year in Tawang area of Arunachal Pradesh—two fatal Cheetah accidents took place last year.

In another major setback, there have been a number of accidents, some fatal, involving the HAL-developed and manufactured Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) in the last one year. Preliminary investigations have identified the root cause related to certain flaws in a specific area of its design and metallurgy connected to the Booster Control Rods. This year alone there have been three ALH accidents involving the Coast Guard, Navy and the Army, the latest being the crash landing of an Army ALH in Kishtwar area of J&K in May this year, wherein a soldier died and the two pilots were seriously injured. This has resulted in frequent grounding of the entire ALH fleet and imposition of certain restrictions on its flying hours in terms of mandatory and stringent checks to be carried out by the HAL periodically till the design issue is addressed, which could take anything from six months to a year.

While all three Services and th