At least 51% of the 123 TEJAS fighters that will be inducted into the Indian Air Force (IAF) will have the desi UTTAM radar.

The first batch of the 123 TEJAS will replace the Israeli radars. The 40 in initial and final operational clearance (IOC and FOC) configurations and 83 TEJAS MK-1A, orders for which orders were placed in the first week of February. While the first 40 will have mechanical radars (all Israeli), 83 MK-1A planes will have Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars.

A total of 63 of the 83 will be indigenous Uttam radars developed by LRDE (Electronics and Radar Development Establishment), a DRDO lab in Bangalore.

“We will have the Uttam radar from the 21st TEJAS MK-1A to be produced. Uttam has performed better than anticipated in the trials so far. We’ve already signed an MoU with HAL,” DRDO chairman Sateesh Reddy said.

R Madhavan, CMD, HAL, which is producing TEAJS, said: “...that is what we are planning for. Given the delivery timelines we’ve committed to, we will place orders for 20 Israeli radars and Uttam should be ready thereafter. We are targeting to increase indigenous content in TEJAS to 62% to 65%, and this will help achieving that.”

UTTAM is a state-of-the-art AESA radar that can track multiple targets and take hi-resolution pictures to aid in reconnaissance. Seshagiri P, project director, Uttam, said it’s being tested on two TEJASs — LSP2 and LSP3 — and one executive jet. Together they’ve completed around 230 hours of flying, including 30 on TEJASs.

According to LRDE, UTTAM is a current generation system with features that allow aircraft to boast of low probability of intercept and non co-operative target recognition. “It provides better situational awareness of the battlefield scenario and is capable of tracking multiple targets with high accuracy suitable for firing missiles and interleaved air-to-air, air-to-ground and air-to-sea modes for all terrain solutions,” LRDE said.

(Inputs from TOI)

Image Source: TOI