One of the biggest fleets of fighter aircraft currently operated by an Asian nation resides in India. Fielding a fleet of 260 Su-30MKI multirole jets (the last of 272 produced by Hindustan Aeronautics was completed in April 2020, with 12 lost to attrition), the Indian Air Force (IAF) is a major operator of Pavel Sukhoi's best-seller. It is the mainstay of the IAF strike-fighter fleet and will remain so for decades to come. Given its age, the type first entered service in 2002, and the recent cross-border tussles with the People’s Republic of China and Pakistan, the IAF needs to maintain the jets in a configuration that provides a combat advantage over Pakistan Air Force (PAF) Lockheed Martin F-16s and JF-17s, and People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) J-16s, J-20s and Su-35s. Also, the Air Force desperately needs to improve the Su-30MKI's mission availability rates.
Such a need can only be satisfied by a fleet-wide upgrade programme. The IAF has kept the Su-30MKI upgrade programme on its shopping list for several years.
Unofficially known as the Super 30, by the summer of 2019 HAL chairman Shri Madhavan confirmed an engine upgrade, a new radar, electronic warfare suite and beyond visual range missiles are included. Some speculate the new engine model is likely to be the Russian NPO Saturn AL-41FS rated at 32,000lb thrust with afterburner, and new radar to be the Tikhomirov NIIP Irbis-E hybrid passive electronically scanned array based on the N011M Bars system.
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