The Indian Air Force marked its anniversary with confidence in its people and candour about its numbers. The stealth fighter meant to restore its strength depends on a 120-kilonewton engine that India has yet to formally commission.
The parade at Hindon air base on 8 October had the familiar elements: marching contingents, frontline aircraft on display and the Chief of the Air Staff arriving in a vintage car. Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh, reviewing his last Air Force Day before retirement, described a service that has become a networked, multi-domain force and insisted that its strength lies in its personnel more than its machines. Behind the ceremony of the 94th anniversary lay harder arithmetic, and a propulsion question that will shape Indian air power for thirty years.
The numbers problem
At his annual press conference on 3 October, the Air Chief was direct. The Air Force fields about 29 fighter squadrons against a sanctioned strength of 42, as reported from the briefing, and he said it needs 36 to 40 new fighters every year to arrest the decline as older types retire. He expressed hope that the long-pending contract for 114 multi-role fighters could be signed within the current financial year, while cautioning that negotiations run in two directions.
On 6 October the government named the Vice Chief, Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit, to succeed him from 31 October. The new chief inherits a force with proven operational reflexes and a shrinking inventory.
Why the AMCA matters
The long-term answer is the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft, a twin-engine stealth fighter being designed by the Aeronautical Development Agency. The Cabinet Committee on Security cleared the development programme in March 2024 at an estimated 15,000 crore rupees, and in May 2025 the Defence Minister approved an execution model that opens the project to private industry alongside Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.
The aircraft is planned in two stages. The first version will fly with the American General Electric F414, an engine in the 98-kilonewton class that India is also negotiating to co-produce. The definitive second version needs something more powerful, around 120 kilonewtons, to carry weapons internally, cruise supersonically without afterburner and generate the electrical power that modern sensors demand. No engine available to India off the shelf fits that requirement on acceptable terms.
The engine India could not build alone
Jet engines are the hardest element of a combat aircraft to master, and India knows this from experience. The Kaveri programme, begun in the 1980s for the Tejas light fighter, consumed decades and never delivered the required thrust. The difficulty lies in the hot section, where turbine blades cast as single metal crystals spin in gas hotter than their own melting point, kept alive by internal cooling channels and ceramic coatings. Only the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China design such engines independently.
The chosen route is co-development. In August 2025 the Defence Minister confirmed that the AMCA engine would be developed jointly with the French manufacturer Safran, working with the Gas Turbine Research Establishment in Bengaluru. Reports since then describe a programme valued at about seven billion dollars over ten to twelve years, with nine prototypes, an initial thrust of 120 kilonewtons and a later growth version of 140 kilonewtons. The condition that distinguishes it from earlier licence-production deals is that intellectual property is to rest with India, including the hot-section technologies that suppliers have traditionally withheld.
Where the deal stands
Here precision is needed. In early August, Hindustan Times reported that the proposal had reached the Cabinet Committee on Security and that clearance was expected before Independence Day. As late as the end of September, specialist reporting noted that no signed contract or joint venture for the engine had been publicly announced. We were unable to confirm that formal approval has been granted. Until it is, the engine remains an agreed intention and not a funded programme.
The delay has consequences. Engine development sets the pace of the whole aircraft. If the first AMCA prototypes fly towards the end of this decade with American engines, and the new engine takes a decade or more from contract, the fully capable version cannot enter service before the second half of the 2030s. Each month of indecision moves that date further out, at a time when China is fielding stealth fighters in quantity and has supplied advanced aircraft to Pakistan.
Groundwork already under way
Some preparation has not waited for the paperwork. The Gas Turbine Research Establishment is building a twin-cell test facility rated for engines of up to 130 kilonewtons at Rajanukunte near Bengaluru. In October 2025 it placed an order with the private firm PTC Industries for finishing work on single-crystal turbine blades, the first time an Indian company has been entrusted with such a task. Hindustan Aeronautics is expected to be the production partner.
These are modest steps, but they address a real weakness. India’s aero-engine effort has suffered less from a shortage of design talent than from the absence of test infrastructure, a flying test bed and a domestic supply chain for exotic materials. An engine programme that leaves those behind would be worth having even if the first engine arrives late.
The questions to watch
Three issues will determine the outcome. The first is governance: a joint programme between a government laboratory and a foreign company needs clear authority over design decisions, something the Kaveri effort lacked. The second is the depth of technology transfer. Full ownership on paper must translate into Indian engineers who can modify and uprate the engine without foreign help. The third is the interim fleet, since delays in F414 co-production affect the Tejas Mk2 as well as the first AMCA.
The Air Force’s anniversary message was that people matter more than equipment. That is true in operations. In procurement, the equation is less forgiving: without engines there are no fighters, and without an engine of its own India’s air power will continue to depend on decisions taken elsewhere.
– Karthik Beesu
