Civil aircraft type certification

Every large jet in India's civil fleet is imported. As of 2025, no Indian-designed aircraft above 19 seats has ever been certified or flown commercially, and the entire big-jet fleet is Boeing or Airbus.

The reason is not a shortage of factories. It is certification. Type certification is the formal, evidence-heavy process by which a regulator agrees an aircraft design is safe enough to carry the public. For large transport aircraft — regional jets and airliners, the FAR/CS-25 category — the process is so demanding that only a handful of states hold globally recognised authority to run it: the US FAA, Europe's EASA, Canada's TCCA and Brazil's ANAC, which coordinate through a shared forum, alongside China and Russia.

India can certify small aircraft, and does. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), India's statutory airworthiness regulator, certified NAL's two-seat Hansa trainer in 2000 under light-aircraft rules. In May 2022 it issued a type certificate to HAL's Hindustan 228-201 under the latest FAR-23 standard — the first fixed-wing aircraft type-certified in India to that requirement, now in limited service with Alliance Air. But the Dornier 228 is a foreign design, licence-built by HAL since 1983, not an Indian clean-sheet aircraft. And even that civil certificate leaned on EASA support after DGCA-EASA technical meetings in Cologne in August 2019.

The clean-sheet story is harder. NAL's Saras is described as India's first indigenously designed civil transport and the first Indian programme aimed at the FAR-25 large-transport standard. A prototype crashed near Bengaluru in 2009, killing three IAF crew; DGCA's investigation did not attribute the crash to a design flaw, but the programme was shelved for years. Revived from 2016, the Saras Mk2's first-flight target has slipped repeatedly, cited variously between early 2026 and December 2027. The larger 70–90-seat Regional Transport Aircraft, conceived over two decades ago, remained largely on paper as of mid-2025, without final approval, investor commitment or an operator order book.

Why does the gap persist? Partly institutional. HAL, rooted in military aviation, lacks organisational experience in the iterative, certification-intensive discipline of civil aircraft development; NAL remains research-focused and has historically lacked manufacturing depth. That combination has been blamed for repeated delays.

Partly it is the regulator's own posture. For foreign-designed large aircraft, DGCA issues a "Letter of Type Acceptance" rather than a full independent primary certificate recognised reciprocally abroad — India functions largely as a validating authority, not an originating one. DGCA is also understaffed and lacks its own recruitment powers, which is why the government has been planning to replace it with an autonomous Civil Aviation Authority modelled on the FAA.

And partly it is the foundations beneath the airframe. A certifiable regional jet needs a certifiable jet engine — a high-bypass turbofan India does not yet have. Even a regional turboprop needs an indigenous or licensed powerplant, still emerging. Fly-by-wire flight control is emerging; extended-range reliability engineering does not exist. For an Indian type certificate to be honoured abroad, DGCA needs reciprocal validation agreements with the FAA and EASA — a capability still forming.

What it would take is now partly visible in law and money. The Bharatiya Vayuyan Adhiniyam, 2024, effective 1 January 2025, for the first time brings aircraft design — not just operation and maintenance — into DGCA's statutory scope. And as of January 2026 the government was reported to be considering roughly ₹12,511 crore ($1.36 billion) for an RTA special-purpose vehicle, with the bulk earmarked for certification and testing rather than design alone. That allocation is the clearest official acknowledgement of where the mountain actually is: not in drawing an aeroplane, but in proving it.