ENHANCING CAPABILITIES OF ATTACK HELIOCPTER(HAL PRACHAND) UNDER PROJECT EFAHS(oppurtunity for startups)

Hal prachand or LCH(Light combat helicopter) is second indigenous light attack helicopter designed and developed by HAL and in combine efforts with DRDO,MSME and other players in the market segment. Prachand was another derivative of hal dhruv helicopter which was been developed by hal back in 1990 and been main stay for army and Airforce and recently navy for decade and proved its safety records and operation endurance. Hal prachand is light attack helicopter developed for high altitude warfare designed for indian conditions and been worlds only attack helicopter that can perform significant high altitude operations in the world of having service ceiling till 6500m above sea level . This article cover only future prospect of enhancing prachand capabilities for enhancing its further situation and attacking capacity and will set for international case analysis after Russia- Ukraine war.

Looking at the current conditions and changing dynamics of air warfare and its role as supporting troops and army on the ground , It seems attack helicopters played major role in providing required support for ground troops and also necessary operations for destruction of enemy air defense , But in those operations both ukrainian and russian helicopters were shot down by shoulder mounted air defense system and short range air defense system maximum of the cases and also their operations are effected by multi spectrum warfare. By looking at the usage and also its performance numbers , One must say attack helicopters are useless and should be replaced by drones?. Well no, attack helicopters are not going anywhere for next 100 years , As technology evolving offensive and defensive weapons are evolving and the flexibility of conducting close air support missions is only systematically possible by those tail blade choppers because of their low flying and precise target location capability.

To gather all these problems faced by helicopters present and future , Project EFAHS (ENHANCEMENT OF SURVIVAL FOR ATTACK HELICOPTERS) will be key solution for all these domain of spectrum for survival. The idea is to develop and built Manned - Unmanned teaming solution to enhance the survival for these helicopters . As per the idea suggestion Future prachand will have 4 Uav with different and performing multiple operations together by having net centric warfare capabilities. Idea description / Template :

1 Four drones will be part of single prachand helicopter

2 These drones will be stealthy , low cost ,multi role capabilities such as air to air, anti tank role, destroying radars, anti personal role , also electronic and cyber warfare role

3 These drones will have range and altitude as same as Hal prachand and can be enhanced by based on operations framed by forces .

4 UAV will have optronic multi spectral targeting pod , 360 degree incoming distributed detection system , hacked information module , payload bay for holding different weapons and capacity, terrain fallowing system, machine learning based supervised classification of enemy threats and preparing counter measure systems , data fusion and integration and finally with fully autonomous or man in loop mode

5 It is expected to have 70-80 percent of indian components and will be mostly powered by Hal made turbo- meca shakti engine series to power uav.

These are the intial features of the project and new changes as well as criticalideas from startups are welcomed and this project will bound to shape future of helicopters

jai hind