How does one take the fatal Friday, March 28, 2014 crash of a brand new American Lockheed Martin-made Super Hercules ‘medium transport/multirole’ aircraft fuselage fitted with four British Rolls Royce AE-2100D3 turboprop engines, operated by top-grade ‘master green’ transport pilots of the Indian Air Force, that fell from the sky in broad daylight and in fair-weather flying conditions? Were the Indian fliers so incompetent as to mess up a ‘super-sophisticated’ aircraft of American origin in perfect flying order? Or was it something else which was totally unavoidable owing to unforeseen and unprecedented machine malfunction? Although a prompt ‘court of inquiry’ has been constituted to uncover the details of the crash, one sincerely hopes that it does not end with an ‘avoidable pilot error’ from India as the most ‘plausible reason’ for the accident, concluding that there was nothing wrong with the brand new four engine American Lockheed Martin C130 J-30 Super Hercules. Surely, one has full confidence on Indian Air Force’s professionalism to unearth the true cause of the accident.
It is an aircraft that made its debut in the global arena in the 1950s as Lockheed Hercules 130-A. Through constant development and upgradation the present model, the C-130J-30, is in use, apart from the United States of Amercia, among selected customers such as Australia (12), Canada (17), UK (25), Denmark (4), Israel (3), Italy (22), Norway (4), South Korea(4), Iraq (6), Kuwait (3), Oman (3), Qatar (4), Tunisia (2) and India (6).
Users aside, what makes this highly sophisticated aircraft interesting to be watched is the wide price variation of similar aircraft (C-130 J-30) as can be seen from the credible open source information gleaned from Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. Thus, whereas the unit cost of 1995 Australian craft was $55 million, the baseline price of the same C-130 J-30 was quoted as $67 million in 2002. The unit price of the craft nevertheless went up to $70.5 million in 2003 and a single C-130 J-30 for Israel was quoted at $98.6 million.
However, when in March 2008, the Indian ministry of defence announced the signing of a contract worth $1.06 billion to receive six Lockheed Martin C-130 J-30 Super Hercules transport aircraft from the US under the “foreign military sales” programme, the aircraft unit cost to the Indian customer went up to more than $160 million. That was far more than the price quoted to other customers. That, perhaps, is the way Indians do the shopping of imported military hardware since the Bofors days of the mid-1980s. Thus, taking a standard exchange rate of Rs 60 to one American dollar, the loss of an IAF aircraft is a cool Rs 1,000 crore down the drain along with the loss of precious human lives.
03/04/14 Abhijit Bhattacharyya/Telegraph
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It is an aircraft that made its debut in the global arena in the 1950s as Lockheed Hercules 130-A. Through constant development and upgradation the present model, the C-130J-30, is in use, apart from the United States of Amercia, among selected customers such as Australia (12), Canada (17), UK (25), Denmark (4), Israel (3), Italy (22), Norway (4), South Korea(4), Iraq (6), Kuwait (3), Oman (3), Qatar (4), Tunisia (2) and India (6).
Users aside, what makes this highly sophisticated aircraft interesting to be watched is the wide price variation of similar aircraft (C-130 J-30) as can be seen from the credible open source information gleaned from Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. Thus, whereas the unit cost of 1995 Australian craft was $55 million, the baseline price of the same C-130 J-30 was quoted as $67 million in 2002. The unit price of the craft nevertheless went up to $70.5 million in 2003 and a single C-130 J-30 for Israel was quoted at $98.6 million.
However, when in March 2008, the Indian ministry of defence announced the signing of a contract worth $1.06 billion to receive six Lockheed Martin C-130 J-30 Super Hercules transport aircraft from the US under the “foreign military sales” programme, the aircraft unit cost to the Indian customer went up to more than $160 million. That was far more than the price quoted to other customers. That, perhaps, is the way Indians do the shopping of imported military hardware since the Bofors days of the mid-1980s. Thus, taking a standard exchange rate of Rs 60 to one American dollar, the loss of an IAF aircraft is a cool Rs 1,000 crore down the drain along with the loss of precious human lives.
03/04/14 Abhijit Bhattacharyya/Telegraph
