India's AWACS story is as thrilling and mystifying as that of a phoenix

A November morning, 1996.

As the mist had cleared over the Yelahanka airfield near Bengaluru, a host of VVIPs, including prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda, defence minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, star-bearing air marshals and DRDO chief A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, sat down to watch dazzling fighter jets taking off and getting into stunts at Aero-India, India’s biennial air show. Just then, a pedestrian voice announced from the ATC: “Next, ASP Avro.”

That was the understatement of the year. Hardly anyone paid attention to an Avro.

From a corner of the airfield, an old Avro lumbered down the runway and lazily lifted into the air, like an ostrich too heavy to fly. The propellers whirled noisily, eating up the air in front and keeping the garishly painted giant machine afloat. A thousand eyes turned to the slowly rotating dome, perched asymmetrically over the plane, somewhat like a Great War cannon on a pack-camel’s back. It kept a monotonous pace with the rambling plane, yet slowly activated a magnetic field of pride, admiration and envy.

Those who were on the airfield and watching could not believe their eyes—they were looking at an Indian AWACS in flight!

Sadly, as the superstitious would say, it attracted the evil eye too. About two years later, during an experimental flight from INS Rajali at Arakkonam, near Chennai, “after 90 per cent of the project had been completed”, the whole aircraft, complete with the rotodome, four scientists and four IAF men, crashed. The rotodome collapsed over the plane, and the plane “did two somersaults, then swerved to avoid electricity lines and the villages”, as an eyewitness told THE WEEK correspondent then.

With that went down India’s AWACS dreams.

Fast forward to February 11, 2017.

The mist over Jodhpur airfield had not yet cleared when the radio inside a gadget-filled room crackled: “Chanakya! This is Mission Commander Antrix. Porus claims the simulated enemy aircraft; targets destroyed.”

Antrix, the crew in Netra, India’s eye in the sky, was reporting to Chanakya, the ground station, that combat air patrol Porus had destroyed a simulated enemy aircraft called Sorethumb.

Netra had spotted Sorethumb for Porus to destroy.

The two crisp sentences electrified the small bunch of military scientists and IAF officials huddled in the room. They had done it. Three days later, on February 14, the ‘eye in the sky’, or the first India-built AWACS, was handed over to the IAF. With that, India became the seventh country to have built its own flying radar—after the US, Russia, China, Israel, Brazil and Sweden. “It was our Valentine’s Day gift to the nation,”recalls Dr Rajalakshmi Menon, director of the Centre for Airborne Systems (CABS), Bengaluru, which had developed the flying radar.

India’s AWACS story is as thrilling and as mystifying as that of the mythical bird Phoenix from Greek mythology, that is believed to live a thousand years, burns itself into ashes, and then is born again from the ashes. The Indian AWACS, too, has had its births and deaths, and is now reborn. Netra is the third, achieved after two failures.

The idea of AWACS—airborne warning and control system, essentially a flying radar, or a plane with a radar that would spot enemy planes as soon as they take off from their home fields—had captured the imagination of air warriors since the 1960s. The idea was simple. A ground radar picks up enemy aircraft only when the enemy gets too close, because enemy aircraft tend to fly low. That leaves very little time for defending forces to react. But what if one has a radar that flies up in the sky? It would spot the enemy plane as soon as it takes off from hundreds of miles away.

“The higher we fly, the more the distance that can be seen; that gives us the advantage of early detection to carry out the strike,” says Dr Suma Varughese who, along with Rajalakshmi, was part of the core team that developed the ill-fated ASP Avro under the supervision of Dr Sargunaraj Christopher.

The same team later developed the Netra, which is today flying the Indian skies and prying into enemy skies. Christopher retired after heading the DRDO, and Varughese is now heading the Micro Electronic Devices, Computational Systems & Cyber Systems (MED & CoS).

The first AWACS that appeared in the global skies was the US Hawkeye, which was soon put up for sale. Pakistan could not afford it, but when the US sold one to Saudi Arabia, Indian air warriors worried that it could be lent to Pakistan if the latter asked. Since India could not afford to buy one, the Indira Gandhi government ticked the option to develop one locally.

Studies began in 1985 under project ‘Guardian’, later renamed ‘Airawat’, after Indra’s white-skinned flying elephant. By a coincidence, the first office was set up in a hotel, which had a rotating dome, in New Delhi’s Asiad village! “Yes, Airawat was the butt of jokes as the proverbial white elephant,”recalls Christopher who was asked to develop its surveillance system at Bharat Electronics. “The Airawat was the first phase where a feasibility study was conducted on a paper design based on Russian A50 aircraft, which is nothing but the Ilyushin 76 aircraft modified with a dome on top for AWACS purpose.”

The challenges were two-fold. One was to build a rotating dome that would emit radar signals and capture them back when reflected by enemy aircraft. The second, more challenging, involved structural engineering—how to fix a rotating dome over an airplane filled with electronic command and control systems, and keep the plane stable in the air.

Funds were at a premium. As the national kitty got smaller and smaller towards the politically unstable late 1980s, priorities had to be reordered. Techno dreams like guided missiles, combat aircraft and battle tanks got priority over flying radar, and slowly Airawat was given a quiet burial.

But when science dreams, you cannot kill it. The idea of an Indian AWACS stayed in the minds of men like CABS’s founder director Dr K. Ramchand and Christopher, as also the ever-dreaming mind of Kalam. Even otherwise, labs like the DRDO’s Electronics & Radar Development Establishment (LRDE) were working on radar technologies for the IAF and the scientific minds could not keep themselves off packing them into a flying object.

“The ASP project was the phase II where an attempt was made with HS 748 aircraft (Avro), which is an old British design produced and maintained by HAL. IAF spared two of their transport HS 748, which were modified by DRDO to carry a rotodome,” says Christopher.

Technology development was sanctioned, and soon the HAL built a 24x5 foot rotodome, which could house the radar antenna. The idea was to develop technologies, mount the ASP onto these aircraft, test the systems, and then go for development. “We had our first flight just with the rotodome on September 5, 1990, an achievement by itself,” recalls Rajalakshmi.

That gave the confidence to work further. CABS was set up in 1991 under Dr Ramchand to act as a system house and integration agency. The challenge was to rotate the dome for all-round coverage. That is where they failed a second time, leading to the unfortunate crash in January 1999.

“I went in that ill-fated aircraft in the previous sortie, for the trials of my systems on the airborne radar. I felt that God had spared me to complete the indigenous development of our own AEW&C [Airborne Early Warning and Control System] and I was determined to complete it,” recalls Christopher.

Air Marshal Philip Rajkumar, who headed the inquiry wrote later: “During the course of flight testing, the aircraft was cleared to a maximum speed limit of 180 knots... and altitude of 10,000 feet.... However, the speed limit for lowering the flaps was left untouched and it was presumed that the take-off flap at 150 could be lowered at the laid down limits of 180 knots, but was never tested in flight or analysed on the ground.”

The problem was with structural engineering. “The rotodome design was such that the centre of pressure was towards the front half of the rotodome and therefore the load on the rear bracket was presumed to be compressive,” the report continued. “However, when the flaps were lowered at 180 knots, the aerodynamics of the rotodome changed in such a fashion that the lower half became tensile because of the shift in centre of pressure. Under these circumstances, the two rear brackets failed, as established by the Court of Inquiry.”

Give it up, DRDO was told by political masters. If the IAF wants one, they can buy.

Christopher and team did not give up. “We all believed that if America or Israel can do it, so can we… and we decided to do it all our way. Well, it means indigenous,” recalls Varughese. They still nursed hopes of building another, probably not one with a rotodome that was unstable, but something more robust. “The crash was a costly lesson we learnt,” says Rajalakshmi. “Also by then, the technology had changed from mechanically scanning to electronic scanning.” In other words, you don’t need a rotodome to rotate; you can have a fixed panel that emits electronic waves all around. “From 1999 to 2001, we did a lot of studies on newer technologies,” she says.

Experiments began with an Israeli Phalcon airborne surveillance system mounted on a huge Russian Ilyushin-76 aircraft. At the same time, the effort to develop the indigenous AEW&C continued earnestly since 2004. The challenges were manifold.

“The prime sensor, the radar, was the first AESA [Active Electronically Scanned Array] where the critical components, the technology and its first use directly on an airborne installation posed many challenges,” recalls Varughese.

Basically, three systems had to be developed—the AESA-based Primary Radar (PR), Identification Friend or Foe (IFF), an electronic intelligence and signal intelligence system all hosted on the Embraer-145.

Luckily, by the 2000s, funds were no longer a problem. Liberalised India was shining, making money, and spending money.

In October 2004, the project to design and develop three AEW&C systems at a cost of Rs1,800 crore was approved and the funds were released in December 2004.

“Subsequently, the Operational Requirements was changed by IAF four times with increased systems such as air-to-air refuelling, additional crew and their seats, enhancement of flight endurance with reserve fuel and icing certification. This resulted in several iterations of design and suggestions to IAF even for a change of platform to meet the ORs. Hence, the compliance matrix could be signed between DRDO and IAF only in February 2007, which is the real start of the programme,” points out Christopher. “I was involved in the phase I programme when I was in BEL, Ghaziabad, and continued in phase II when I was in LRDE, DRDO, Bengaluru. Later, I was in full control of the phase III of the programme which ended successfully in Netra.”

Soon it became a joint effort with agencies like Centre for Military Airworthiness & Certification (CEMILAC), Directorate General Quality Assurance, the IAF, the Electronics & Radar Development Establishment (LRDE), and many others, with CABS in the lead role.

“We were sanctioned 43 schemes to develop all kinds of technologies,” says Rajalakshmi. “We collaborated with multiple labs within the DRDO, academic institutions, public sector units, and several small industries.”

The sleek Embraer that replaced the giant Ilyushin was fitted with homemade radars. “We developed the radars, we developed the mission systems and integration was done fully by us,” says Rajalakshmi. “There were many foreigners who would like to come and discuss and say that, okay, they would be able to give the technologies or develop, co-develop or even try to sell their products. But we had decided it had to be indigenous.”

Rajalakshmi makes another point: “None of the big companies responded to any of our tenders. It was only MSMEs who responded. And they were in the learning phase. We were also in the learning phase. Together we have actually succeeded”.

On January 26, 2017, the AEW&C was flown for the first time in the Republic Day Fly Past with the call sign Netra. After being successfully flight-tested in Chabua, Bathinda, Jamnagar, Gwalior, Leh and many other places in India, and in Brazil, Norway and Sweden (the Americans did not allow tests in Alaska) before the final testing run in Jodhpur on February 11, 2017, it was handed over to the IAF on February 14, 2017.

The composite sorties totalled more than 11,700 hours. It was the first time in India that such an extensive flight test of an airborne system had been carried out.

“The Indigenous airborne surveillance system was like the proverbial Phoenix that rose from the ashes of the crash of the ASP of 1999,” says Dr Varughese. No other country has mounted that many systems on an Embraer 145 platform, but the hunger to succeed led us to innovate and come out with success.”

But what gives Dr Rajalakshmi goose pimples even now is the memory of IAF’s cross-border strike on a terrorist camp in Balakot in Pakistan in 2019 when the surveillance systems placed on an Embraer jet hovered around in a supporting role to the raiding IAF fleet of fighters. It was crucial to the IAF operations.

“For a military scientist, to induct a system in one’s lifetime is in itself a dream,” she says. “To see it being used and operationally deployed is amazing. Otherwise, when we are doing the flight trials, we know a system’s capability but then we cannot speak about it.” Rajalakshmi’s latest obsession is to put the Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition & Reconnaissance (ISTAR) in place.

“The AEW&C or the Netras are doing well,” says Christopher. “Even international press reports say that the Balakot victory was due to Netra! These AEW&Cs are virtually one-tenth in size and fuel consumption, but have all the functionality of AWACS. Therefore, for immediate requirement, the IAF has asked DRDO to give another 12 systems, out of which six will be in the same Embraer aircraft while the other six will be built on Air India’s used Airbus 321 aircraft.”

The future looks bright for the Netra, including on the export front. A gritty never-give-up story of human tenacity and endurance overcoming repeated failures. “Right from the beginning there was demand from South American countries and later, Indonesia also joined the league,” says Christopher. “The profits are expected to be large, but this depends on the industry that is going to be producing the same. More than that, the maintenance and upgrade contracts will be for at least another 30 years. The tacit benefit is the relationship between India and other countries.”

—With R. Prasannan