It appears that India’s Tejas light fighter ,already more than 30 years in development, will face further delays:

Delayed by more than 15 years, India’s homegrown Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Mark-1 is ready for critical test flights necessary for its final operational clearance (FOC) at the end of the year, but analysts and Indian Air Force (IAF) officials say that clearance will slip again, to next year.

Though he did not provide a date for the test flights, a Defence Ministry official said they will include firings of a variety of weapons, including air-to-air missiles and Israeli-made Derby beyond-visual-range missiles. The Russian-made close-combat missile R-73 has already been integrated on the aircraft.

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“FOC would most probably slip to sometime in 2016,” Kak said. “But given the track record, these kind of slippages have over the years been accepted as par for the course.”

The Air Force ordered 20 of the Mark-1s after the aircraft’s initial operational clearance in December 2013, and is set to order an additional 20 following FOC. State-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) will produce all 40 aircraft under limited series production and says it has the capacity to produce eight LCA Mark-1s a year once the full order is placed.

But so far the Air Force has received only one aircraft to use for weapon integration and testing, not the four it wanted to have at this stage.

“Weapons integration has been on for quite some time and the LCA has fired the R73 missile and laser-guided bombs during [the Air Force’s] firepower demonstration in February 2014,” said Daljit Singh, retired Air Force air marshal. “However, more weapons are required to be integrated. In addition to weapons integration, test flights are also required to integrate and test other avionics and systems.

This program has been in development for 32 years, and they still cannot deliver the number of aircraft needed for qualification trials, and those that they do develop will have a lower performance engine than the original domestic powerplant.

This is a complete cluster f%$#.