Seventh F404 Arrives as Nearly 30 Tejas Mk1A Airframes Wait on Engines

There is a peculiar arithmetic governing India’s most important fighter programme right now, and it fits in one sentence: Hindustan Aeronautics Limited has built close to thirty Tejas Mk1A airframes, and it has seven engines to put in them. The seventh arrived this week — GE Aerospace handed over another F404-IN20 turbofan to HAL, according to reports published on 7 and 8 July — and each delivery is genuinely good news. But at one engine per handover, the gap between finished fuselages and flyable fighters remains the defining fact of the programme.

Why this matters is not complicated. The Tejas Mk1A is the aircraft the Indian Air Force is counting on to replenish its fighter squadrons, and the jets themselves are, by most accounts, substantially ready. HAL has manufactured — and in many cases flown — nearly 30 Mk1A airframes, with several now waiting only for engine installation before final integration, certification and handover to the air force. The bottleneck is not Indian assembly capacity. It is the supply of American powerplants.

How the Backlog Built Up

The delivery record explains the frustration. The first F404-IN20 under the current contract reached HAL on 26 March 2025, and GE supplied five engines over the course of that year. The pace then slackened: just two engines arrived in the first half of 2026, with the previous handover coming on 2 April — meaning the seventh engine landed roughly three months after the last one. For a production effort with squadron deadlines attached, a trickle of this kind sets the tempo for everything downstream.

The paper commitments are much larger. The original order covers 99 F404-IN20 engines for 83 Tejas Mk1A fighters under a contract valued at Rs 48,000 crore. In late 2025, HAL and GE Aerospace signed a follow-on agreement for 113 additional engines to power the expanded acquisition of 97 more aircraft, with those deliveries scheduled between 2027 and 2032. On paper, that is 212 engines across the two orders. In hand, there are seven.

What changes the picture — if it holds — is GE’s near-term promise. The company has committed to delivering a batch of 20 additional engines between June and December 2026, before settling into a sustained rate of 24 to 26 engines a year. Twenty engines in six months would be a sharp acceleration over anything GE has managed since deliveries began, but it is also the number that makes the rest of the programme’s schedule credible. Observers assess that if those engines arrive on time, HAL could hand over the first Tejas Mk1A fighters to the air force by late 2026.

That conditional is now the whole story. HAL has demonstrated that it can build airframes faster than they can be engined, which means the programme’s schedule risk has migrated almost entirely from the manufacturer in India to the supplier in the United States. Every completed fuselage parked on the assembly line is capital already spent and capability not yet delivered, and no amount of further effort in Indian factories can close that gap — only crates arriving from GE can.

The seventh engine is therefore best read not as a milestone but as a down payment. The measure of the programme in the second half of 2026 will not be handover ceremonies for single turbofans; it will be whether the promised twenty arrive by December — because the airframes, unusually in the history of Indian fighter procurement, are already waiting.