LCA Tejas' lands on Indian Navy’s aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya for the first time

New Delhi, Jan 11: The naval variant of the home-grown Light Combat Aircraft Tejas on Saturday successfully landed on aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya. This is the the first time an indigenous fighter aircraft has landed on an aircraft carrier.

With the landing, India became the sixth nation after Russia, US, France, UK and China to have mastered the art of an arrested landing and ski-jump take-off on the deck of a carrier.

In September last year, Tejas had successfully carried out an "arrested landing", a key performance demonstrating its ability to land on board an aircraft carrier, making it a major milestone in development of the naval variant of the fighter jet.

"With this feat, the indigenously developed niche technologies specific to deck-based fighter operations have been proven, which will now pave the way to develop and manufacture the Twin Engine Deck Based Fighter for the #IndianNavy," the Indian Navy tweeted.

"After completing extensive trials on the Shore Based Test Facility, DRDO, ADA developed LCA Navy did an arrested landing on INS Vikramaditya succesfully today 11 jan 2020 at 10:02 hours. Commodore Jaideep Maolankar did the maiden landing," the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) tweeted.

Defence minister Rajnath Singh hailed the DRDO and the Indian Navy after Saturday's successful test.

"Extremely happy to learn of the maiden landing of DRDO developed LCA Navy on INS Vikramaditya. This successful landing is a great event in the history of Indian Fighter aircraft development programme. Congratulations to Team @DRDO_India & @indiannavy for this achievement," Singh tweeted.

India has a requirement for 57 deck based fighters for its carrier operations.