Airbus hands over first C-295 aircraft to IAF at ceremony in Spain's Seville

Indian Air Force on Wednesday received its first C295 transport aircraft with the officials of the Airbus Defence and Space handing over the plane to Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal V R Chaudhari in Spain.

The new aircraft, which will be flown to India by a joint IAF-Airbus crew, will be inducted in the service on September 25 at Hindon Air Force station near Delhi. The C295 fleet will replace the IAF’s ageing Avro aircraft.

"It is a momentous day for us, for the IAF in particular, and a nation as a whole to receive the first aircraft which marks the beginning of a new era, wherein we will be manufacturing 40 of these aircraft in India," Air Chief Marshal Chaudhari said.

The IAF chief also took a sortie in the new aircraft, which flew for the first time in May.

The aircraft can carry up to 71 troops or 50 paratroopers, airdrop cargo, be used for medical evacuation and take off and land in short and unpaved runways.

This is the first of the 56 aircraft that India purchased from Airbus in a nearly Rs 22,000 crore contract that the Defence Ministry signed with the aviation major in September 2021.

As per the deal, 16 aircraft will arrive in fly away condition from Airbus’s manufacturing facility at Seville 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.

The IAF is scheduled to get its second aircraft in May 2024 while the next 14 will be rolled out at a rate of one per month until August 2025, Airbus said in a statement.

The remaining 40 C295s will be manufactured and assembled in Vadodara and production of components for these aircraft has already started in Hyderabad. These parts will be shipped to the Vadovara unit, which is expected to be operational by November 2024.

The first ‘Make in India’ C295 will roll out in September 2026 and the final aircraft is expected to be delivered to the IAF by August 2031.