Successful test flights of Tejas LSP-3 and LSP-4 recently and soon to be test flown LSP-5 ,will give major boost to the Tejas Weaponization program , LSP-3 which was the first aircraft to carry a Active Radar on board Tejas , earlier weapons testing were limited to dropping of free gliding (Light) bombs and single firing of un-guided R-73 BVR missile .
Now with MMR radar been successfully integrated with aircraft first phase of Weapon testing will start from September-October onwards , Most challenging will be testing of   Air to Air BVR missiles  , since the missile needs to be successfully synchronized with radar and other equipment on board , Tejas will be carrying three different types of BVR missiles from different countries , Indian Astra Bvr , Israeli Python-5 , Derby along With Russian R-73 and R-77 .
Initially Russian BVR will be used in the aircraft , while Russian have not provided Source code for their BVR missiles to work smoothly with new radar and the aircraft but Indian air force which has years of experience on this missiles seems to have been successful in integrating them with MMR radar , while Israeli missiles will not be having such problems since MMR HYBRID is partially based on Israeli Elta 2032 radar and will have source code of Israeli bvr missiles , MMR Hybrid’s major chuck of testing was done  on board Israeli modified Boeing aircraft in Israel.
once first phase is completed IOC will be granted to the aircraft ,and second phase of weapon testing will start which will involve firing of Air to surface missiles on ground target still and moving  , Rocket pods , dropping of GPS guided/laser guided /cluster bombs on land targets , and also of free falling bombs , after which aircraft will be given FOC , which is expected by  2011-12.

BY: IDRW NEWS NETWORK