| Indian Air Force to order more Su-30MKI |
 Today, the Su-30MKI two-seat supermanoeuvrable multirole fighter fleet is the trademark of the Indian Air Force and its most sophisticated combat planes in service. To date, the Russia’s Irkut corporation has supplied IAF with over 50 fly-away aircraft of the type and India’s HAL corporation has been licence-producing the Su-30MKI since 2004, with the licence production to last until 2014 at the least.
Irkut delivered the first 32 Su-30MKIs under the 1996 contract to IAF during 2002–2004. Later on, 18 more fighters of the type arrived in 2008–2009 under a “trade-in” deal clinched in 2007 as a replacement of 18 Su-30Ks delivered in late 1990s
The contract with India on licence production of 140 Sukhoi Su-30MKIs, NPO Saturn AL-31FP thrust vector control engines and avionics, including the Tikhomirov-NIIP Bars phased-array radars, was signed on 28 December 2000. It became the major deal in the Russian-Indian cooperation, valued at $3 billion-plus. The first HAL-assembled Su-30MKI was accepted by IAF on 28 November 2004. In 2007, Rosoboronexport and Irkut, on the one hand, and the Indian Defence Ministry, on the other, made a deal for 40 Su-30MKIs more, which boosted the number of HAL-produced fighters up to 180. Irkut started the delivery of the knockdown kits under the new contract in 2008. HAL’s boss Ashok Nayak has said recently that his corporation had delivered “about 105 Su-30MKI planes” to IAF, with the Indian Defence Ministry expected to order 42 fighters more, driving the total number of HAL-assembled Su-30MKIs up to 222 units. Thus, IAF might get as many as 272 planes of the type by the mid-decade, including the Su-30MKIs supplied by Irkut in fly-away condition. Meanwhile, the Su-30MKI programme has not been sitting on its hands, and the fighter being delivered to India these days differ from those supplied earlier in the decade in greater capabilities of the fire control system owing to latest operating modes and enhanced characteristics of the avionics suite. Since the Su-30MKI production and deliveries will have continued for at least four to five years more while their service life will last at least 25 years, further improvement of the aircraft by means of even more sophisticated avionics and weapons comes to the fore. Such priorities now include the arming of the Indian Su-30MKI fleet with the cutting-edge BrahMos-A long-range precision-guided multirole air-to-surface missiles that is under development by BrahMos Russian-Indian joint venture, which has already delivered missile’s ship-based and land-based versions to the Indian Navy and Army. In addition, the upgrade will apply to the fighter’s avionics suite. The current preliminary agreements stipulate phased upgrade of the Tikhomirov-NIIP’s Bars phased-array radar. The first phase of the upgrade is supposed to boost the radar’s performance through introduction of additional operating modes as well as more-capable computers and software. This is to maximise the reliance on the solutions of the existing phased-array radar already productionised by India under Russian license. Phase two of the upgrade is to see the Bars’s passive phased array replaced with an active electronically-scanned array (AESA).
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