Aerostructure composite manufacturing

Composite structures make up 45% of the HAL Tejas by weight, making it one of the world's lightest fighters. India builds those structures. It cannot yet make the material they are built from.

Aerostructure composites — carbon-fibre skins, spars and ribs bonded into load-bearing airframe parts — are irreplaceable in modern aircraft, where they can account for 35 to 50% of the weight of next-generation platforms. Getting them right is hard because a flight-critical composite part must survive fatigue, heat and impact without the crack-tolerance of metal, then prove it through non-destructive inspection and NADCAP-grade process control. Only six nations produce these at scale: the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and India.

India's position is real and growing. HAL's Aerospace Composites Division at Bangalore manufactures composite components for the Tejas and the Dhruv and Rudra helicopters, ramping the Tejas Mk1A towards 24 airframes a year by 2025 from Bengaluru and Nashik under a ₹46,898 crore contract for 83 aircraft. CSIR-NAL developed Carbon-BMI co-curing technology in-house after more than twenty years of technology denial, built indigenous autoclaves, and supplies primary structures — fins, rudders, wing spars, engine-bay doors rated to 200°C — for FOC-standard Tejas. L&T delivered the first full CFRP wing set for the Mk1A in 2025 using Automated Fibre Placement. Tata Advanced Systems and Kineco hold NADCAP approvals and supply floor beams, wing spars and fuselage assemblies to global OEMs including Boeing and Airbus. DRDO has unveiled a quartz-cyanate ester radome for the Tejas Mk II and begun vendor engagement for Resin Film Infusion on next-generation airframes — AMCA, TEDBF and UCAVs.

The gap sits one layer down, in the raw material. India has no indigenous carbon-fibre production and no domestic aerospace-grade CFRP prepreg. Every structural Tejas part is laid up from imported prepreg; resin systems and honeycomb cores such as Nomex are imported too. The Mk1A centre fuselage is sourced from VEM Technologies but still depends on foreign prepreg and core. The global material supply is concentrated among a handful of firms — Toray, Hexcel, Mitsubishi Chemical, Syensqo, SGL Carbon. India machines and cures composites at rising scale while remaining exposed on their feedstock.

Closing that gap means building what the components sit on: indigenous PAN or pitch carbon-fibre lines, industrial-scale epoxy and BMI resin production, and broader NADCAP accreditation across the private base. India's imports of aircraft and spacecraft reached US$9.66 billion in 2024. The airframes are increasingly Indian; the fibre inside them is the next climb.