The first Airbus-made C295 transport aircraft for India has successfully flown its maiden flight, marking a significant milestone towards its delivery to the Indian Air Force by the second half of 2023.
The first aircraft took off from an Airbus facility at Seville in Spain last Friday and flew for three hours, the company said in a press statement on Monday. The C295 fleet will replace the ageing Avros being flown by the IAF.
The defence ministry in September 2021 signed a Rs 22,000-crore contract with Airbus to buy 56 C295 aircraft, of which 16 aircraft will arrive in fly-away condition between September 2023 and August 2025. The remaining 40 planes would be manufactured by a Tata-Airbus consortium at a plant in Vadodara in the next six years at a rate of eight aircraft per year.
The C295 assembly line being built in Gujarat is the first large Make-in-India defence programme in the private sector that is likely to create an aviation ecosystem involving a large number of companies for manufacturing, assembly, testing, delivery and maintenance of the aircraft.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi in October laid the foundation stone of the manufacturing plant at Vadodara. As a part of the manufacturing process, 13,400 detail parts, 4,600 sub-assemblies, and all the seven major component assemblies - outer wings, centre wing box, nose fuselage, centre fuselage, rear fuselage, empennage (tail assembly) and doors would be made in India.
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