The Tejas Story: Crash, Delays & India’s Defense Reality

0:08 A few days ago, India lost one of its finest wing commander Namanch Seal and exceptional test pilot of the Indian Air Force. He went down with his stages fighter aircraft during a demonstration flight at the Dubai air show. In a matter of seconds, a routine highperformance maneuver turned into a fatal spiral. The jet crashed, burst into flames, and the nation lost a brave son. A fighter jet can be rebuilt. A defense program can be restarted.

0:55 But a pilot, a human life once gone, is gone forever. Wing Commander S leaves behind his wife, herself, an Indian Air Force officer and their younger daughter. To the family, to the squadron, to every air warrior who puts their life on the line, we salute you. We honor you and we stand with you in this unimaginable grief. In aviation, especially military aviation, accidents demand silence first, respect first, and investigation first. There is already a flood of speculation videos breakdowns

1:42 experts, but the truth is we do not yet know what went wrong. Let the official inquiry speak. Let data not noise tell us what happened. But what we can talk about today is and what we must talk about is the noise that exploded immediately after the crash. Within minutes of the tragedy, social media and TV studios began buzzing with a familiar debate. Is the program a failure? Should India abandon it? Is it time to junk the American GE engine? On one TV debate, retired General GD Bakshi even suggested that India should stop using the

2:30 American GE engine despite the fact that India spent decades negotiating the GE 404 and later GE414 engine deals. Why? Because beneath the emotional reaction lies a deeper frustration. A frustration built over 40 years of delays, shifting specification, cost overrun and missed deadline. The tis program has always been a lightning rod. One crash, however tragic, becomes fuel for decades of pentup criticism. But to understand today's debate, we need to go back back to the beginning back to 1983 when the

3:16 idea of a light combat aircraft first entered India's imagination. The year was 1983. India had a simple but extremely urgent problem. Our aging Mig21 fleet once the backbone of the Indian Air Force was approaching the end of its life. India needed a modern lightweight multi-roll fighter aircraft that could replace the Mig 21 in large numbers. The answer was the LCA light combat aircraft program. A dream to build a modern delta wing fighter,

4:04 flybywire controls, composite material airframe, supersonic capability, indigenous avionics and most importantly an indigenous engine. To execute this vision, the government created the aeronautical development agency, the ADA in 1984. H will build it. DRDO labs would contribute avionics, radar and flight control. GTRE would build the engine, the caviri. GTRE is the gas turbine research establishment, a laboratory of India's DRDO located in Bangalore. On paper, it looked like

4:50 India's moment of glory. But in reality, it became a case study in how ambition without realistic planning can derail programs for decades. By the early '90s, the tages design was taking shape. A beautiful delta wing silhouette, a promise of cuttingedge technology, but cuttingedge technology is expensive. And India of the 1990s was not the India of today. Every component India wanted to build indigenously, flight computers, composites, radars, actuators, sensors was coming from a technological base that was simply not

5:36 mature enough. And yet India pushed we must build our own fighter. We must be self-reliant. The first prototype took flight in 2001, a full 18 years after the program was sanctioned. By global standards, that itself is a very long development cycle. But for TEAS, this was just the beginning of the delays. Let's talk about the elephant in the room, the Cavaryi engine. The heart of any fighter aircraft is its engine. And the cavei project was supposed to be India's pride until it became India's embarrassment. Years of testing, thousands of crores

6:23 spent, dozens of prototypes and still not enough thrust, not enough reliability, not enough performance. The cavary simply could not power the tages. This one failure pushed the program back by more than a decade. Eventually India turned to the Americans. The GEF404 engine was chosen. Later India negotiated the more powerful GF414 for MK2 series. This is the same foreign engine dependency that critics today complain about. But the truth is India had no choice. Without the GE engine,

7:08 Tjis would not even exist today. Another major reason for delay was moving goalposts. Over the year, Indian Air Force kept increasing specifications. Add this radar, add IFR probe, add more payload, improve the brakes, add new electronic warfare suite, reduce the weight, increase the range. Every change meant redesign, retesting, reertification. Imagine trying to build a small car and then being told halfway through to make it into an SUV and later told to convert it into an electric sports car without increasing the timeline. In May this

7:55 year, Air Chief Marshall Amar Pri Singh had voiced strong concerns over persistent delays in India's defense project. urging accountability and timely delivery. His remarks came nearly three months after he publicly expressed displeasure over the delay in delivery of the Tajas MK1A fighter jets by HL. But that's how exactly Tjis developed. This is why the FOC, the final operational clearance kept slipping. Miss 2010, Miss 2012, Miss 2015 finally appeared in 2019.

8:47 The program was not just a technological challenge. It became a political football. Every government wanted credit. Every government blamed the previous one. Every government announced breakthroughs that were not actually breakthroughs. From 2004 to 2014, the UPA government kept the project alive, but slow. From 2014 onward, the NDA government increased orders and tried to speed up production, but neither side could fix the underlying structural issues. HAL slow production line, DRDO, HAL turf wars, supplier delays,

9:32 technology dependencies and the gigantic time gap between prototype and production. Tjas became a symbol of both India's ambition and India's inefficiency. Today, the upgraded TAUS MK1A is a much more capable aircraft. It has a much better radar system, a digital RWR, new electronic warfare suite, midair refueling, better maintainability, lower in weight, and more weapons compatibility. Indian Air Force has ordered 83 units. More orders are likely. Countries like Malaysia, Argentina, Egypt have shown intermittent interest. But the Dubai

10:20 crash will definitely create hesitation in the short term. Let's be clear, one crash does not define an aircraft. Every fighter has had a crash history. F-16, the Mirage 2000, the Sukoy 30, the Rafal, Grippen, name many. The real question is does Tjas have a future strong enough to overcome its past. After the Dubai crash, some voices demanded abandoning Tedus entirely. Others said India must go 100% indigenous and break from American Indians. Both positions are emotional. Neither is practical. Let's examine

11:05 reality. If India abandons their today, the Indian Air Force loses a modern light fighter replacement for the MiG 21s. The squadron strength crisis worsens. India becomes even more dependent on foreign fighters like the Rafal and India's multi-roll combat aircraft, the AMA. India's next generation fighter becomes nearly impossible. If India insists on no foreign engine, there is no Indian engine available today that can power a modern fighter. Cavaryi is still not ready for operational use. Jet engine development takes 15 to 20 years

11:50 minimum. So the idea that India can walk away is not just unrealistic, it is strategically dangerous. If we look objectively, Tjis is not the failure. stages is a symptom. The failure is the system that built it. Slow decision making, unrealistic timelines, lack of accountability, changing requirements, weak program management, limited budgets, multiple agencies working in silos and no clear leadership chain. For any complex system like a fighter jet, this combination is deadly. This is why India took 40 years to field a light fighter that countries like Sweden took

12:38 8 to 10 years to develop. Until this system changes, no aerospace program tas MK2 or the AMCA can succeed on time. This is the critical question. If not TIS, then what? Let's evaluate India's actual option. Option one, buy more foreign fighters. Rafal, Grippen, F-16V, SU30 upgrade. The pros are quick, ready, high performance. The cons are extremely expensive, zero self-reliance and long-term dependence. The option two is accelerate TEAS MK2. The MK2 is promising but realistically it will not

13:24 enter service before 2030 or even later like 2032. And option three is bet everything on India's multi-roll combat aircraft. India's fifth generation fighter. A beautiful design, a technological leap. But if they just took 40 years, AMA will take at least 20. And option four is to start joint development with another country like India, Russia, Brahmos model possible but politically and financially it is difficult and it won't solve the existing squadron gap. So the only realistic answer is India's does

14:10 not have a better alternative than Tjas. Cancelling it now would be like abandoning the ISRO program because SLV3 failed in the 1990s. India must fix stages, upgrade it, streamline production, improve safety standards, invest heavily in nextgen engines, hold agencies accountable, cut the bureaucracy. India must do whatever it takes because Tjas is not just a fighter jet. Tjis is India's aerospace future. If stages fails, India's next two generations of fighter development will fail with it. Let me close where I

14:56 began with wing commander naman seal. He flew that aircraft in Dubai not to glorify himself but to represent India to show the world that India can build, fly and field a modern combat aircraft. His lost must not become a political argument. It must become a reminder. A reminder of what is at stake. A strong defense ecosystem saves lives. A delayed ecosystem puts lives at risk. The best tribute to wing commander seal is not outrage, not hashtags, not shouting on TV debates. The best tribute is to fix what's broken. finish what we started in

15:43 1983 and build a fighter aircraft that every Indian pilot can trust with their life. Tjis is not perfect. Tjas has struggled. Tjas has stumbled. But the answer is not to walk away. The answer is to finally get it right. The question is not should India abandon TES. The real question is does India have the courage to finish what it started? Because in the skies half measures don't fly. Let us quickly hand over the first operational MK1 to the air force and name it namanch who will always fly. Thank you for watching. I'm AJ Praash.