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From The Times of India

India’s first indigenous aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant (2013-)

Sources include

INS Vikrant (1961-97)

AFP | Aug 12, 2013 [1]

The Times of India

Rajat Pandit , TNN | Aug 12, 2013 The Times of India

Kaveree Bamzai August 10, 2013 | India Today

India's first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant fades into history IANS/ India Today November 21, 2014

INS Vikrant of 1961

India's first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant was built for the British Royal Navy as HMS Hercules on Oct 14,1943. It was commissioned in the British Royal Navy in 1945. Built by Vickers Armstrong, the ship's construction was stopped shortly therafter because World War II had ended.

In 1957 the ship was purchased by India in an incomplete condition. The then Indian high commissioner to Britain, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, bought it on behalf of India.

INS Vikrant underwent a four-year-long refitting at the Harland and Wolf Yard in Belfast, Ireland, with an angled flight deck. It was armed with two squadrons of British Seahawks and French Breguet Alize aircraft.

She had a full load displacement of 20,000 tonnes and was commissioned in the Indian Navy on Feb 16, 1959. The sleek, 192-metre-long vessel, a draught of 24 feet, and could sail at a speed of 43 km per hour with a range of 22,000 km.

After she was finally completed she arrived on Nov 3, 1961 to formally join the Indian Navy fleet in the Bombay Harbour, and was received by the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other top officials amidst great fanfare.

In 1961, the landing of the first jet aircraft on board the ship was handled by naval pilot Lt. R.H. Tahiliani.

Indian Navy Captain Pritam Singh was her first commander.

Many years later, Tahiliani not only commanded the same vessel but was also appointed the Chief of Naval Staff in 1984. Admiral Tahiliani retired in 1987.

She was Asia's first aircraft carrier.

Over the years, she was fitted with various types of aircraft, including Westland Sea Kings, HAL Chetak, Sea Harriers and also the dreaded Bofors anti-aircraft guns.

In the 1965 India-Pakistan war, she was claimed as 'sunk' by Pakistan though she was actually undergoing a refit in the dry docks.

The Majestic-class aircraft carrier played a key role in enforcing the naval blockade of East Pakistan during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971.

For her exciting service full of wartime thrills and action, especially during the 1971 war, INS Vikrant was awarded two Mahavir Chakras and 12 Vir Chakras.

She was decommissioned on Jan 31, 1997.

INS Vikrant was anchored off Mumbai Harbour and served as a museum in Mumbai from 1997 to 2004. The condition of the ship became so bad that it was not worth continuing it as a museum, the authorities felt. Besides, Navy would be able to use the space vacated by the ship in the Dockyard for some other fruitful purposes.

In January 2014, during the hearing of a public interest litigation which opposed the plan to scrap the ship, the Union ministry of defence told the Bombay high court that it had completed its operational life. the Maharashtra government stated that to preserve it as a museum would not be viable financially.

Maintenance and upkeep costs became overwhelming and after many sentimental public protests and legal battles, in April 2014 she was finally sold as scrap for Rs.60 crore to IB Commercials Pvt. Ltd.

"A team of around 200 people has been deployed to dismantle and break down the ship after we completed all legal and technical formalities and secured all requisite clearances from the agencies concerned," IB Commercials Pvt. Ltd. director Abdul Karim Jaka told IANS from the Darukhana ship-breaking yard No.10 at Powder Bunder in southeast Mumbai.

The process, which started in Nov 2014 when the first blow was hammered on her front portion, is expected to be completed within seven-eight months.

INS Viraat: 1987

India has one aircraft carrier in operation - a c.1960, 28,000-tonne, British vessel acquired by India in 1987 and renamed INS Viraat - but it will be phased out in the coming years.

INS Viraat, the Indian Navy's present flagship, is among the world's oldest ships in service. Joined the British Royal Navy in 1953 (and the Indian Navy in 1987).The ship will retire by 2017.

INS Vikramaditya: 2013

From The Times of India

India's ally Russia is set to hand over a third aircraft carrier - INS Vikramaditya – in 2013 after a bitter row over the refurbished Soviet-era warship caused by rising costs and delays.

The Navy is all gung-ho about the induction of the 44,570-tonne INS Vikramaditya, the Admiral Gorshkov carrier has completed sea trials in Russia after a $2.33 billion refit in Russia, by by November 2013.

INS Vikrant II: built 2013, to be inducted around 2018

India’s first indigenous aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant (2013-)

India launches first indigenous aircraft carrier INS Vikrant

KOCHI: India launched its first indigenously-built aircraft carrier in Aug 2013, a landmark moment in the $5 billion project that seeks to project the country's power and check the rising influence of China.

The INS Vikrant, which means "courageous" or "bold" in Hindi, is a 40,000-tonne vessel which will carry Russian-built MiG-29 fighter jets and other light aircraft.

While its hull, design and some of its machinery is domestically made, most of its weaponry will be imported as well as its propulsion system, which was sourced from GE in the United States.

Timeline

India is steadily, albeit slowly, building a powerful three-dimensional blue-water Navy for the future at a projected cost upwards of Rs 3 lakh crore between 2013 and 2030.

The 260-metre-long INS Vikrant itself will take till 2020 to become battle-worthy.

The 40,000-tonne carrier will have to undergo extensive weapon and aviation trials, which will include supersonic fighters taking off from its angled ski-jump and landing back on the flight deck with the help of "arrestor" wires, before being declared fully-operational.

When the INS Vikrant comes into full service in 2018 (or 2020 acc , India will become the fifth nation to have designed and built its own aircraft carrier, pushing ahead of China to join an elite club that includes Britain, France, Russia and the United States, which are the only countries that can build carriers of this size. China did induct a carrier, the 65,000-tonne Liaoning, in September 2013, but it was purchased in a half-ready state from Ukraine in 1998.

INS Vikrant will not be ready to go to war anytime before 2020 even if it's handed over to the Navy in 2018, as is now scheduled.

The ship, which will be fitted with weaponry and machinery and then tested over between 2013 and 2014, is a major advance for a country competing for influence in Asia, analysts say.

A power projection platform?

"The need for a strong and vigilant Navy to defend our mainland, island territories, off-shore assets, EEZ and maintaining our sea lanes of communication needs no emphasis," said defence minister A K Antony, at the "launch" ceremony of INS Vikrant at the Cochin Shipyard

"It is going to be deployed in the Indian Ocean region where the world's commercial and economic interests coalesce. India's capability is very much with China in mind," Rahul Bedi, a defence expert with IHS Jane's Defence Weekly, said.

[India needs to safeguard it primary area of geo-political interest stretching from Persian Gulf to Malacca Strait and beyond as well as effectively counter the expanding Chinese Navy's hunt for "strategic space" in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).]

"All these [advanced naval ships] are power projection platforms, to project India's power as an extension of its diplomacy," Bedi added.

Military hardware: Successes and failures

New Delhi is spending tens of billions of dollars upgrading its mainly Soviet-era military hardware to bolster its defences.

The Indian navy is currently working on 39 ships and has begun planning to make another two aircraft carriers, Bedi said.

The Navy, which is "committed" to supporting "indigenization" as a "strategic core competency", has its plans well chalked-out. "Out of the 47 warships and submarines currently on order, 46 are being built in Indian shipyards," said Navy chief Admiral D K Joshi.

Successes in its long-range missile and naval programmes have been tempered by expensive failures in developing its own aircraft and other land-based weaponry, leaving the country highly dependent on imports.

INS Vikrant is two years behind schedule after problems in sourcing specialised steel from Russia, delays with crucial equipment and even a road accident in which vital diesel generators were damaged.

Vikrant will not alter the balance of power with China

"Its primary role will only be to defend our naval fleet and it will not be used for ground attacks," retired rear admiral K. Raja Menon told AFP.

"It's a defence carrier so it will attack platforms that are coming to attack our (naval) fleet ...without air defence our fleet just cannot survive," Menon said.

C Uday Bhaskar, a retired naval officer and former director of the National Maritime Foundation in New Delhi, said the ship would "enhance India's credibility" - but it "would not alter the balance of power with China".

"China's nuclear expertise and ship-building capabilities are of a higher order," he said.

Overall, India lags far behind China in defence capabilities, analysts say, making the success in beating its regional rival in the race to develop a domestically-produced aircraft carrier significant.

China's first carrier, the Liaoning, which was purchased from the Ukraine, went into service in September 2013. Beijing is reportedly planning to construct or acquire a bigger ship in the future.

SAIL manufactures steel for indigenous aircraft carrier

Jayanta Gupta, TNN | Aug 7, 2013,

The Times of India

ROURKELA/BHILAI: Several theories have been forwarded on why the Titanic sank after striking an iceberg in the north Atlantic in 1912. Experts from the Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) now claim that the hull of the ship had too much sulphur and was too brittle to survive the impact. The cold waters of the ocean made matters worse.

The metallurgists had to study the accident as they were asked to perform an extremely difficult task. They had to develop a variety of steel that was hard as well as tough, properties that are in conflict with each other."In 2002, the Navy informed us that India's first indigenous aircraft carrier has been designed. However, no country was ready to export the quality of steel required to build it. We would have to come up with special quality steel for the Indigenous Aircraft Carrier (IAC) or the project would get scrapped. This was an extremely challenging project. We had to achieve properties which were in conflict with each other. We had to achieve low levels of Sulphur in the steel and restrict hydrogen to very low levels. The steel also had to be very hard and extremely tough. Normally, hard steel is not malleable but tough steel is. But then, hard steel is not tough. We had to control 10 elements within a very narrow range for optimum chemical composition," a SAIL metallurgist at Bhilai said.

The Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory (DMRL) came up with specifications and the Heavy Engineering Corporation (HEC) Ltd in Ranchi succeeded in making ingots but the steel had to cast continuously into plates for the ship. The Cochin Shipyard would require nearly 28,000 tonnes of this steel to build the IAC. "The DMRL called this Project 249. The purpose was to build warship grade steel that was better than the imported variety. The challenge before Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP) was to produce plates of 8-16 mm thickness without Quenching and Tempering (Q&T), through controlled rolling.

The Q&T process - in which the finished plates are reheated and then dunked into oil or water for a specific period and then heated once more to 'iron out' the stresses - is used to strengthen the steel but is not available at BSP. Our challenge was to get the properties in the plates without the Q&T process. The steel we were required to make was called DMR 249 Grade A and would form the hull and other parts of the infrastructure. It took a lot of doing but we came up with a product that was better than any steel that the country had ever imported. It was calculated that the steel could absorb an impact of 78 Joules at 60 degrees Celsius below zero. This was unique. As temperature reduced, the steel became tougher. Later, we succeeded in making the same grade of steel of 18-20 mm thickness without Q&T," another senior official at BSP said.

The steel had special qualities. It could be bended into a 'U' shape without any structural damage. To build the ship, special welding would be required as the steel was unique. At the same time, the Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) was also busy. The Special Plate Plant (SPP) at RSP had the facilities to carry out the Q&T process and it started working on plates that are thicker than 20 mm. There were two other variants of the steel to be supplied. One was the DMR 249 Grade B manufactured at Alloy Steel Plant in Durgapur. Though small quantities of this would be required, its need was crucial. It was required to build the flight deck of the IAC and had to have spring back qualities. The SPP worked on the plates of DMR 249 Grade B supplied by ASP and strengthened them through Q&T and another round of quenching. The affair was so hush-hush that any portion of scrap left over was sent back to ASP. "We also succeeded in manufacturing the DMR 249 GradeAZ25 that had special quantities. This steel was required for the machine room of the IAC. It had to possess the capability of getting compressed by up to 25per cent. While manufacturing this grade, we succeeded in developing a sample that could be compressed up to 65%," said G S Prasad, chief executive officer.