NEW DELHI – Indian Air Force has decided to upgrade entire Su 30MKI fleetof near 300 fighter jets with dangerous upgrades from Russia.
India has plans to upgrade the Sukhoi-30MKI with modern “radar and weaponscapabilities and also enhance features that tackle obsolescence managementand electronic warfare aspects”, Indian Air Force Chief Air Chief MarshalRakesh Kumar Bhadauria confirmed on Friday.
An Air Force Veteran and senior defence analyst said the upgraded radarwould likely be the NIIP N035 Irbis E (Snow Leopard), a 20 KW classsteerable hybrid ESA radar fitted on the Su-35.
“At full power, the radar can detect an F-35 at a distance of 58-km(36-mi), In tracking mode, the distance drops to 29km,” Vijainder K Thakur,Air Force veteran and defence analyst having hawk eyes on technologicaldevelopment said.
Designed by the Tikhomirov Scientific Research Institute (NIIP) in Moscow’sZhukovsky city, the Irbis-E is a direct evolution of the BARS design,all-weather multimode airborne radars of a Russian family, butsignificantly more powerful.
The radar is cited at an average power rating of 5 kilowatts, with 2kilowatts CW rating for illumination. The NIIP claim twice the bandwidthand improved frequency agility over the BARS, and better electroniccounter-countermeasures capability.
However, Harsh Vardhan Thakur, an experimental test pilot said: “Whendefining pick up and rack ranges for the F-35, the low-observability mayhave been exaggerated. I think F-35 can be picked up at larger ranges, justas a J-20 can.”
It is expected that upgrading the Su-30MKI will not take much time asRussia already implemented significant upgrades including radar and engineson the Su-30SM which is in the service of the Russian Air Force.
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Vijainder K Thakur said Russia had integrated Su35 IRBIS-E Radar andAL-41F-C1 engines on a Su-30 airframe with the Su-30SM, which represents aconvergence of the two platforms independently developed from the Su-27,aimed at mitigating logistics & maintenance overheads.
In 2018, Indian Air Force Sukhoi Su-30MKI reportedly managed to detect thelatest Chinese J20 jets supposed to be a top-of-the-line stealth aircraftoperated by China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).
J-20 fighter jets, as claimed by China, are made up of radar-absorbingmaterials that are supposed to make it hard to detect at long ranges.
Earlier this month, the German radar-maker Hensoldt claimed that it managedto track American F 35 from a pony farm for almost 100 miles (about 150 km)during an air show, the C4ISRNet website reported.
The Sukhoi Su-30MKI is a Russian-designed heavy, long-range fourthgeneration air superiority fighter, built under licence by India’sHindustan Aeronautics Limited. The planes were introduced into the IndianAir Force in the early 2000s, with India making about 250 of the planes by2018, and continuing to build more.
