Friday, February 11 2005 16:37 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Bangalore: India today (Feb 11, 2005) said its home-grown Airborne Early Warning and Control System (AWACS) will be operational by 2011.

"We hope to make it (AWACS) operational in a time frame of six to six and half years," Electronics and Radar Development Establishment (LRDE) director K U Limaye told reporters at the Aero India show in Bangalore.

Centre for Airborne Systems (CABS), the Bangalore-based DRDO unit, has revived the airborne early warning system programme that it had scrapped following a crash of rotodome radar-fitted Avro aircraft near Arakkonam in Chennai in 1999, in which eight people, including four scientists were killed.

Limaye was heading CABS as director when the Centre revived the Rs 1,800 crore project that will have a phased-array radar fitted in an executive jet aircraft.

"There was an emotional setback when we lost the people in the crash. But much of the work in the earlier model is being used in the new programme," DRDO chief M Natarajan said.

Denying that India had zeroed on a Brazalian Embraer aircraft for integrating the radar, he said, the country was in talks with several jet makers in the world and, "anybody is free to issue a press release, but so far we have not firmed on any aircraft".

Embraer early this week said it had signed a MoU with DRDO to sell three of its executive jets for the AWACS and both the agencies were working on studying the technical specification for the project.