Recovery Parachute System for Indian LCA Developed by DRDO

Indian Govt. organization DRDO develops "Recovery Parachute System" for its LCA Tejas.Does it mean that this Light Fighter could drop straight down when flying in the sky? Its an obscure phenomenon, because Indian authorities and online defense forum members are sounding like " this is a fighter that there are no types exists like this one where F-16 C/Ds could match a little". The LCA program inducts an aerodynamic design straight from French "Mirages" and takes 30 years to develop an aircraft. HAL grasps some manufacturing capabilities by assembling Russian designed and ultimately final tested aircraft Sukhoi-30 MKI, specially made version for India.

Every year India loses pilots through the crushes of  "ancient bisons", the MiG-21s, so they feared about such crushes. And a little more doubt make them anxious about LCA. For this reason it is believed that Govt. wants a system which could minimize the damages and  loosing lives of pilots and ultimately refusal of pilots to fly these "premature" LCA birds.

The news about this "Recovery Parachute System" was published on defenceforumindia.com. Which is same as below_

[December 2005, defenceforumindia.com]

Recovery Parachute System

It is mandatory for a combat aircraft to demonstrate its spin recovery capability during flight test programme. The purpose of this system is to provide emergency recovery of aircraft from an inadvertent spin in case the aircraft controls are ineffective and are unable to pull it out of spin. The recovery is achieved by deployment of a parachute, which applies an anti-moment force at the rear of the out of control aircraft bringing its nose down further. This brings the aircraft into a controlled stabilized dive and helps it to come out of spin/deep stall.

DRDO has developed such parachutes for the flight test of LCA. The test altitude envelope for LCA (9500 kg weight) is 2 km to 12 km. The sequence of operation is as follows: 

 When a drogue gun is fired, the slug mass of the drogue gun moves rearwards and sequentially deploys the pilot chute at an aircraft wake distance of 23 m. When the pilot chute is stretched, snapping of the weak tie (48 kg) separates the slug mass of the drogue gun along with deployment bag of pilot chute. The chute then inflates and consequently pulls the packed main parachute. As the pilot chute moves rearwards the main parachute deploys sequentially. As soon as the main parachute is stretched, snapping of the weak tie (100 kg) separates the pilot chute and the deployment bag of main parachute. This allows the main parachute to inflate and produce necessary drag force of 32 kN, resulting in a yawing movement of aircraft. It then steepens the flight path angle (a-angle) of the aircraft. The aircraft can then be pulled out of spin by increasing its speed. The total operational time of the system is 3 s. When the aircraft comes out of spin, pilot jettisons the parachute by operating the release mechanism. The system has various redundancy/safety devices. When the release system fails, parachute can be separated through failure of weak link by accelerating the aircraft by 30 per cent.


Development work at sub-system level has been successfully completed and final qualification tests are under progress.