New Delhi: India has demonstrated that its indigenous Light Combat Aircraft‘s naval variant can land on board an aircraft carrier and take-off from a ski-jump runway on the flight deck of the warship, in efforts made yesterday and today.

On Jan. 11, the naval variant of the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA-Navy) carried out a successful arrested landing on board the INS Vikramaditya, the Indian Navy‘s lone operational aircraft carrier, which has been sailing in the Arabian Sea.

Today, the aircraft took off from the aircraft carrier’s ski-jump flight deck. The achievement was tweeted about by both the Indian Navy and the DRDO.

This achievement came after the LCA-Navy had completed the extensive trials on the Shore Based Test Facility (SBTF) in INS Hansa air base in Goa.

Commodore Jaideep Maolankar conducted the maiden landing and Captain Dahiya was the Landing Safety Officer (LSO) and Commander Vivek Pandey was the Test Director on ship. Group Captain Kabadwal and Commander Ankur Jain were monitoring the aircraft through telemetry from SBTF.

The LCA-Navy, developed by Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), is a technology demonstrator and the Indian Navy has decided to invest in the twin-engine carrier-based combat aircraft that DRDO’s Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) is working on as the future jet to operate on Indigenous Aircraft Carriers.

DRDO Chairman and Department of Defence R&D Secretary Dr G. Satheesh Reddy congratulated the DRDO, ADA, Indian Navy, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Directorate General of Aeronautical Quality Assurance (DGAQA) teams for the successful arrested landing of LCA-Navy on INS Vikramaditya.

More details on the LCA-Navy landing on INS Vikramaditya were scooped by NDTV’s Vishnu Som in this tweet thread: