As India and China build their respective aerospace industries, the one glaring gap remains their inability to mass produce wholly indigenous modern aircraft engines. It is that one major area where both countries remain dependent on foreign support to varying degrees. In the next few years, India however has the potential to create a major domestic industrial and technological base in the arena of aero-propulsion by leveraging its diverse military aviation purchases.
Clever use of the offsets that will mandatorily follow with most imports will not only allow the domestic aerospace industry to integrate itself with global supply chains but should also facilitate the timely transfer of technology in critical areas. In this context, the Ministry Of Defence (MoD) must act ruthlessly by not allowing foreign majors to offload yesterday's technology. Nothing should however stop heightened domestic research and development (R&D) in propulsion technology as that is the best guarantee to hold foreign companies to their promises as it were.
According to estimates, India's aero-engine market alone (summing over various acquisition and upgrade programs) will amount to at least 15 billion dollars for the next ten years. Since a lot of this will be met via imports a very large offset opportunity exists for India's emerging aerospace industry in this domain. These opportunities span the entire spectrum from supplying engine components to providing maintenance repair and overhaul (MRO) services.
In fact MRO related expenses can often exceed the initial procurement cost of an engine. Maintenance which includes dismantling, inspecting, assembling and testing aircraft engines is however the single largest MRO segment. Engine Maintenance constitutes 35 percent of the overall cost of maintaining an aircraft. More than two thirds of engine maintenance is taken up by the cost of materials, with labour accounting for another 22 percent. India's MRO segment is expected to grow to 3 billion dollars by 2020.
Now, aero engine components that are likely to be sourced domestically include casings, blisks, shafts, housings, stators, pump housing bushing, sleeves and sub-assays. This would mean that there will be ample business for existing tier-2 and tier-3 players. The tier-3 segment in particular (theoretically any company which has some casting and forging capability and can build fasteners, bearings, wiring harness and machine structural sheet metal can become a tier-3 supplier) is likely to see a major influx of new companies.
However getting these potential suppliers many of whom are small firms to conform to aerospace standards will require a degree of handholding from the sourcing firms and the government. In that sense the emerging aerospace special economic zones (SEZs) in Peninsular India are likely to play an important role.
Tier-2 players i.e those who will build engine hydraulic systems, electrical power systems etc will of course also be subject to competition from new entrants. For instance, Wipro Infrastructure Engineering has in place an agreement with Spanish company CESA (Compania Espanola de Sistemas Aeronauticos SA), a subsidiary of the global aerospace and defence corporation, EADS, for the manufacture of precision engineering components including hydraulics.
Ultimately however a lot of the business is likely to emanate from sub-contracts issued by India's only existing end to end company in the aerospace business - Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL). HAL is also the only real Indian tier-1 player in the domain of aero-engines. And HAL, whose engine division has a long history of license producing various imported designs, is set to be by far the biggest beneficiary of the acquisition push.
Currently HAL is building engines under transfer of technology for all aircraft acquired from Russia in the recent past like the AL-31 FP for the India's Air force's Su 30MKI and the RD-33 MK for the Indian Navy's Mig 29K.
Further cementing its tier-1 status in the engine space in India, HAL has also been entering into key joint venture partnerships in this domain since the nineties. The most recent of these is International Aerospace Manufacturing Limited (IAML), a 50-50 joint venture between HAL and Rolls-Royce which inaugurated a Rs 135 crore production facility in Bangalore last year.
The unit, with a strength of about 100, incorporates Rolls Royce's newest manufacturing techniques for making aero-engine components and some 130 different compressor parts for the company's Trent family of civil aero engines, as well as for a number of other marine and energy gas turbines. IAML is starting with a vendor base of about 225 small and medium enterprises vendors and this is expected to rise quickly over the next decade.
The Bangalore facility is also likely to help Rolls Royce discharge offset obligations that will arise out of the supply of the IAF's Hawk advanced jet trainer's Adour Mk871 engine and the C-130J's Royce AE 2100D3 engines.
Meanwhile, Honeywell was issued a request for proposal (RFP) by the IAF in 2012 to completely re-engine 125 Jaguars and provide 270 F-125IN turbofan engines.
After Rolls Royce pulled out from the Jaguar re-engining tender, the IAF was allowed to take things forward with Honeywell on a single vendor basis and it seems that the aforementioned deal valued at around 800 billion dollars is likely to go through. Once again, HAL will use its existing JV with Honeywell to garner a share of the offsets from this deal.
HAL's engine division has also been executing component orders for other American tier-I suppliers like Pratt & Whitney (P&W). P&W sources components for rotating and static engines from HAL Koraput and could ride this existing agreement for discharging any offset obligations arising out of the supply of F117-PW-100 engines as a part of the Boeing C-17 purchase by the IAF. GE may look to do the same for its own extant offset obligations given that it is now the beneficiary of a 558 million dollar contract for supplying 99 F414-INS6 engines to power the LCA Mk-2.
The contract also has the option for another 100 engines in the future. HAL and GE have an evolving relationship in the components space since 2009 and it would be interesting to see if the F414 like the Adour Mk 811 for the Hawk is produced in India. In any case GE's technology transfer proposition made under the offset obligations for the contract will also be interesting to see.
It could be that HAL's Shakti engine experience with Turbomeca (part of Safran) is providing the template at some level for these JVs wherein HAL has increasingly moved towards full assembly of engines and even limited co-development. The Shakti engine which powers the HAL Dhruv, HAL Rudra and will also power the HAL Light Combat Helicopter (LCH) is an up-rated version of the Turbomeca Ardiden and was developed under the aegis of a HAL-Turbomeca joint venture.
HAL's tie-up with Safran also includes Snecma HAL Aerospace Pvt. Ltd. (SHAe), based in Bangalore which manufactures high-tech components for aircraft engines.
However not everything is hunky dory between HAL and Safran. In November 2012, HAL looked at commercial bids for 240 engines (plus another 240 as offsets) for the Light utility helicopter (LUH) program. The international tender had followed the breakdown of talks between Turbomeca and HAL when the former had asked for a rather high fee to convert the existing Shakti engine for use in the LUH forcing HAL to float a global tender. Turbomeca however emerged as the lowest cost bidder while LHTEC, the joint venture between Honeywell and Rolls-Royce, offered the CTS800 at a cost 33 percent higher than Turbomeca's bid.
The fact that HAL can now effectively re-negotiate for better deals is also indicative of the fact that the Indian aerospace sector now has more options than it did in the wake of 1998 Pokhran tests. Early in 2013 the Gas Turbine Research Establishment (GTRE), DRDO's jet engine design laboratory, revealed that the MoD had discontinued discussions with Snecma on bringing it as a partner for improving GTRE's GTX-35VS Kaveri engine. Although de-linked from the Tejas program, India needs to keep building on the Kaveri program for newer programs like the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) project.
Given the specifications of the AMCA a much higher thrust engine than the designed output of the Kaveri will be required for the AMCA even though it is envisioned as a twin engine aircraft. Accordingly, tender documents show that GTRE's next turbofan is in the 110 KN wet and 75 KN dry thrust category. An engine of this capability will certainly require GTRE to master single crystal blade(SCB) technology, integrated rotor disk and blades and super alloys of nickel and cobalt. The Kaveri currently uses directionally solidified blade technology and neither that nor even first generation SCBs which can now be fashioned in India will suffice for the new engine. Snecma far from agreeing to transfer any relevant technologies was instead offering that the Kaveri's Kabini core be replaced by a Snecma ECO core which is the heart of the Snecma M88 that powers the Dassault Rafale.
While the Kaveri project has been the subject of much derision by various quarters, the fact remains that it has strengthened India's hand enough in the turbofan space to resist being a dumping ground for yesterday's technology. A lot of the delays in the development of the Kaveri project can also be attributed to the fact that India's industrial base has only now come up to speed to provide the necessary components for prototyping complex devices like modern low bypass turbofans. All the new activity detailed above however means that engine development can now be speeded up using domestic resources itself and this will naturally make foreign partners more amenable to offering better terms of trade.
In fact it is now time that India move quickly to set up a High Altitude Engine Test Facility at the earliest to reduce India's dependence on Russia's Glomov Flight Research Institute (GFRI) and expedite the process of development. It is also time to integrate the Kaveri as it exists onto one of the Tejas demonstrators because it is only when an engine actually flies in the relevant aircraft that designers gets the best feedback about the design. There is simply no short cut in this matter.
Even as India moves forward with domestic R&D, all eyes will be on the engine related offsets that flow from the mother of all aircraft acquisition programs - the MMRCA contract. The MoD, the IAF and DRDO must ensure that Snecma is not allowed to manoeuvre around technology transfer obligations this time over as it has tried to do for the Kaveri improvement contract. In fact given the massive order that Snecma will get from the MMRCA contract it in any case makes no sense to bring it in separately for improving the Kaveri. The MMRCA contract itself if it indeed comes to pass this year should give GTRE and HAL what they need by way of next generation engine technology.
(By: IBN Live Blog)
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