MiG-23s become the new lab rats for aeronautics students

Bangalore: Russian-made MiG-23 fighter jets, phased out in March by the Indian Air Force (IAF) after nearly 30 years in service, haven’t entirely outlived their utility. The aircraft are being converted into laboratories and workshops for aeronautics students.
Two remote engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu have already acquired the ground attack fighters, dismantled and stripped of critical equipment such as radars, arms and engines. While the students can’t get these planes to take off again—Indian defence law prevents non-military entities from flying such planes—they can learn from dismantling and reassembling the fighters using spare parts made locally.
“Displaying the jet in the lab excites (students) than showing (it) on a computer,” says J. Chandrasekhar, chairman, department of aerospace engineering at Amrita School of Engineering near Coimbatore.
“Let us face it, aviation is a glamorous subject. It is easy to make students interested in (the subject by) displaying something spectacular than showing them drawings,” says retired air marshal B.K. Pandey, a former head of IAF training command in Bangalore.
Teaching of aerospace or aeronautical engineering has advanced from textbook drawings and dummy models to three-dimensional computer graphics,?but the course has for long been restricted mainly to the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and some Indian Institutes of Technology.
Over the past few years, though, increased demand for aeronautics engineers has encouraged several colleges to add the subject. In just the past three years, at least 20 colleges in Tamil Nadu have begun offering aerospace and aeronautics courses, says A.K. Natesan, chairman of Excel Engineering College in Tamil Nadu’s Namakkal district.
Excel, which acquired a retired MiG-23 jet in February, sent some of its staff to the Halwara airbase in Punjab—the base for the MiG-23 squadron called the “Valiants”—to study how the plane was being dismantled. Once the jet was brought to the college, the staff helped students put the fighter back together.
At Amrita, too, engineers are reassembling the plane, making spares such as hydraulics locally; later, the students will learn the working of the jet. Both Amrita and Excel didn’t want to state on record how much they paid the air force for the jets but said the fee was nominal.
22/06/09 K. Raghu/Livemint