And the Marut HF 24 project at Bangalore
Prof. Dr. Dipl.-Ing. Kurt Waldemar Tank was not only a brilliant
German engineer and designer of many successful aircraft that flew in the
Second World War but was also a competent test pilot. Responsible for the
designs of the Fw 190 fighter, the Ta 152 fighter interceptor, and the Fw 200 long-distance
Condor, Kurt led the design department at Focke-Wulf which manufactured these
aircraft. While the Fw 190 fighter (over 20,000 were produced) was considered
one of the finest flying fighters of its time, Tank also pioneered nonstop
transatlantic air travel with his Condor aircraft. After the war, he moved to
Argentina, building their first fighter jet, the Pulqui II.
Following the fall of Peron, Tank took up an offer to lead a
design team at the fledgling Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) Bangalore, working
on an ambitious project developing a Mach 2 fighter – the Marut HF-24. Kurt
Tank, who focused on trying to get things going under incredibly difficult
circumstances, and supported by a primitive industrial infrastructure, maintained
a low profile and talked little. Perhaps he had his demons to face. This is his
story.
Though there is plenty of material out there on the German planes
he helped design, and quite a bit on the Marut HF 24, much of the HF-24 information
out there comes from one or two templates which are somewhat incomplete and at
times erroneous, with most of them disregarding the geopolitical pressures
faced by not only the developers at HAL but also the politicians at Delhi, walking
a tight rope in a cold war era, pressured by the Russians on one side and a
combination of America, France and Britain on the other.
It was at FW that he designed the long-distance Fw-200 Condor
and the feared Fw-190 fighter. Most importantly, he was not just a designer,
but also an able test pilot and eventually rose to become its managing
director. As a test pilot, he did have his share of mishaps, but it was his
flying skill that added to his drawing board knowledge of designing planes. Tank’s
Focke-Wulf Fw 190, according to Robert Grinsell was “considered by many
aviation experts and enthusiasts to be the most beautifully proportioned and
aerodynamically designed aircraft of World War II”. Interestingly, he was
always known as Professor Kurt Tank (per some accounts - awarded by the
Braunschweig Technical School), though he became a teacher only much later,
while in India.
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| Fw 190A-3 |
After the war ended, and the British control of Focke-Wulf, interrogations
were completed, Tank, like many other German engineers were looking out for work
and living the life of a refugee, in 1946. During this period, Tank lived in an
ancient castle situated in the Weser hills and had to forage for food and
subsistence! While there is a brief mention of Tank consulting for General
Electric on aero engines much later in life circa 1952, there is nothing on
record about any discussions with the Americans, immediately after the war.
However, the Soviets, the British, China, France, Sweden, Mexico, and Brazil
all investigated the possibility of Tank emigrating to help develop their
aircraft industries. Tank commenced further discussions with the British for a job
with Handley Page, which never reached fruition. The discussions with China were
interesting, and they almost reached a contract stage, but Mao Tse-Tung’s
revolution and nationalist China’s decline put paid to that.
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| Fw 200C |
A rumor that he would be tried under the war trials and a physical
summons to travel to Britain late in 1947, got Tank searching for an escape route
to where hundreds of thousands of Germans, mostly Nazis had fled, namely Juan
Peron’s Argentina. Their exit route was through Denmark, which had not closed
its borders. The go-between, an Argentine SS officer Fultner was involved in the
secreting out of Kurt Tank to Argentina. SS officer Karl Nicolussi-Leck, the
escape agent of the chimeral ODESSA organization, was perhaps the person who
delivered Kurt Tank and later his engineering team to Fultner who then took
over and spirited them across to Argentine. Tank had a hair-raising transit
through Britain and managed the escape to the Southern Hemisphere with his
papers and the microfilms bulging in his pocket, under a false Argentinian passport,
bearing the name Pedro Matties.
Argentina was very rich at this point, the 7th
largest economy, and had the funds to get the people they wanted and the money
to further Juan Peron’s dreams. Several of Tank’s former colleagues, around 62
of them, joined him in Cordoba and together they created something like a
Focke-Wulf Lite unit. Soon after he
arrived in Argentina, Tank’s wife Charlotte passed away and Tank later got
married to a girl 30 years his junior, a girl he knew from her childhood, Sigrid
Güldennage. Meanwhile, his two daughters and a son from his first wife were
growing up.
These engineers and their families lived on the mountain
slopes near Cordoba. The intent was to use the Ta183 designs and make a new
fighter for the Argentine Air Force. They took over the Pulqui project which
until then had been managed not too well by the French Nazi designer Emile
Dewoitine. The Institutio Aerotechnico was formed and by 1950, the advanced
IAe-33 Pulqui II had been modelled using the basic TA 183 airframe, and a
glider version had been tested. Interestingly it had no hydraulic controls. In
1951, a test flight was conducted by Tank in front of Peron. But it all went
south, thereafter.
One of the reasons for Tank’s fall from Peron’s grace, was
the failure of the man behind the ill-fated nuclear fusion project, the
infamous Ronald Richter, whom Tank had recommended to Peron. Tank had been
fascinated by Richter’s ideas, especially the one concerning a lightweight
fusion engine for a futuristic aircraft that Tank had envisioned. But Richter
turned out to be a dud (the word is divided, some call him a crackpot, some
even say his work on nuclear fusion, the Huemul project was sabotaged),
following which Tank also fell from grace. It is also said that the Pulqui II
touted to become the foremost fighter jet in the world, turned out to be a pipe
dream, with its airframe weight and many aerodynamic problems due to
manufacturing difficulties (the frames had to be hand fabricated). Three
prototypes were constructed by 1953 and finally, the fourth one passed tests,
but at a much-reduced speed, and with no reliable large-scale manufacturing
program, export buyers backed out.
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| Pulqii-II |
Meanwhile, the Argentine economy had nosedived and in 1955, Tank’s contract expired. Rumors swirled around of Tank’s request to double his salary which infuriated Peron, of his being arrested for possessing a forged passport (strange since he used to travel to Europe with his German passport). In a coup that followed, Peron was kicked out of Argentina and Kurt Tank was soon in limbo. Strangely the only Pulqui II ever manufactured was used against Peron, in its sole engagement, during the coup!! The new regime could only offer basic jobs and previous contracts were not honored. According to the Kurt Tank biographer – Heinz Conradis, Tank returned to Germany in 1954, faced with a difficult future with no aircraft industry in post-war Germany to work for, and still in contract with Argentina.
That was when Kurt Tank was approached by the Indian
government through Dr. Taupisch, the German trade attaché in Delhi. Tank met
Mahavir Tyagi the defense minister (1953-57) in Bonn, at the behest of Air Marshal
S Mukerji, and was later flown around various facilities in India including the
HAL. While most of his team went to the American firm's Republic Aviation and Glen
Martin, Tank evaluated the Indian offer and negotiated at length, after which
he met Krause, the new minister for Aviation in Argentina, and obtained a
release.
As always, he insisted on his team to accompany him and so
in Feb 1956, Tank arrived in India with a smaller team of eighteen German
engineers and technicians, which number later dwindled to thirteen (most of the
others went back to Germany, remained in Argentina, or moved to the USA). The HAL
team which worked on the new aircraft was led by the Project manager Ludwig
Mittelhuber, three Indian senior design engineers, and about 22 other Indian
engineers with some design experience. Tank was paid a princely sum of Rs 6,000
per month (in today’s terms this is many lakhs of Rs in buying power) but faced
a tall demand of designing a Mach 2 fighter with a 500-mile range and flying at
60,000 feet, using an organization which had thus far built simpler trainer
planes from kits and serviced US and British WWII planes. It is not clear if he
had program management responsibility, i.e., production, supply chain, etc.
Perhaps not, but people saw him as the head and tail of the project.
Sadly, the complete details of Tank’s stay in Bangalore,
especially personal details, are not available anywhere, only the HF-24 development
work at HAL is known to some extent. All we know are a few details of his
meetings with Nehru and VK Krishna Menon, and the fact that he lived in a nice
house with a terrace, nestling among the scarlet blossoms of the cassias. It
had a covered gallery with a balustrade, leading to a timber outhouse which was
perhaps his office, with 49 pillars supporting a roof! Now I cannot fathom
where in Bangalore such a house existed, perhaps somewhere in the Indira Nagar
area, and anybody who can dispel this mystery may comment. It is also not clear
if Sigrid and Tank’s four children (His fourth child Diana must have been 4-5
years old then) stayed in Bangalore or studied there, for he lived there for
close to a decade.
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| Marut HF 24 |
To cut the long story short, he and his team, which had swelled to some 100 plus Indian engineers, designed, and built the HF-24 Marut, a sleek and sharp high-nosed, twin-engine jet, perhaps the aerodynamically cleanest fighter airframe of its time. One of the first glider prototype test pilots, incidentally, was a Malayali - Oyitti Manakkadan Kunhiraman, flying together with Kapil Bhargava. The Marut was intended to be capable of Mach 2(~ 1,500 miles per hour), but the British Bristol Olympus afterburning engines around which it was designed never materialized, so other engines had to be tried.
The engine fiasco resulted from the need for a Bristol
BOr.12 SR Orpheus after-burning turbojet that could produce 8,150 pounds of
thrust. Unfortunately, India did not have or were unwilling (and lots of
geopolitics) to invest 13 million pounds for Bristol to develop the engine
after NATO dropped its need, so the HAL team spent years shopping for an
alternative in the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States, only for
shifting political winds to nix the deal at every turn. In the end, HAL was
forced to make do with non-afterburning Orpheus 703 turbojets used by the Folland
Gnat, which generated just 4,850 pounds of thrust. As a result, what was intended
to be a Mach 2 fighter could barely attain Mach 1, that too at higher altitudes.
The first powered prototype of the HF-24 powered by two
Orpheus 703 engines made its successful flight in June 1961 and the second
prototype in October 1962. An initial batch of these aircraft was handed over
to the Indian Air Force in 1964. Only 147 HF-24s were procured, (including
eighteen two-seat trainers), all inducted by 1968 and these formed the IAF No.
10 Flying Dagger, No. 31 Lions, and No. 220 Desert Tigers squadrons. By then, it
had cost more to produce the Marut in India with very many imported parts, than
it did to fully import more advanced & capable fighters from other
countries.
Various other engines were then looked at, the Russian RD-9F
and VK-7, and afterburning Orpheus, the Egyptian Brandner E-300, the RR RB.153,
the P&W J52, and the GE1/JO-1 but they did not quite work out. There is
some talk of the DRDO/GTRE attempts in 1966 for a reheat system to make an HF
24 Mk II, but Tank does not seem to have supported the idea for design reasons.
Later audit reports on the project mention large cost overruns, tooling issues,
and lack of a production engineering department at HAL, that the new reheat version
performed worse than the original, and that the base drag was considerable. Eventually,
IAF did not support the reheat system idea, and HF 24 manufacture ended in
1977.
Wagner’s book on Tank, edited and verified by Tank, explains
that Menon had to intervene to get the RD-9F engines from Russia and the HAL
team found the bench tests were quite satisfactory. However, the Russians suddenly
became disinterested in the project and did not want to proceed further. Tank realized that the HF24 + RD-9F
combination would perform better than the MIG21 and would therefore jeopardize
the larger ongoing MIG21 deal between India and Russia. Russia then informed
the Indian team that the RD-9F would have a service life of just 50 hours
compared to international standards between 500-2000 hours. All said, India finally
decided not to buy these Russian engines. America stepped in and offered the RB
153 engines, but on condition that India abandon the MIG 21 deal, which was not
possible since the MIG contract had been signed. These aspects never found
their way into any media reports thus far!!
The Egyptian collaboration - Nasser’s aircraft
program to develop the HA 300 had started with Messerschmitt’s guidance. A new
engine was designed by the Germans using a French Mirage model in 1961 and this
was the Brandner E 300, and still a prototype, but then the HA 300 airframe was
not ready. Tank knew of all this after his visit to Helwan in 1963. Remember
that these were the Nehru-Nasser-Tito days, and well, fortuitously India had a
perfect airframe but no engine. So, a plan was floated to gift an HF 24 to
Egypt and test it with an E 300 engine in flight and if it worked, both the
involved countries would buy the missing parts from one another. A test flight
was conducted in 1966, with Tank present. While Indian media stated that the
Egyptians only needed the HF 24 airframe for testing, Wagner writes that the
Egyptians informed India that they could not supply any E 300 engines. Whether
it was because of Egypt’s loss in the 6-day war or due to the political
turbulence in Egypt, is not clear.
Grp Captain Kapil Bhargava who was Marut’s chief test pilot
since 1957, opines (Marut fans blog)
that Tank was quite rigid and a bit old-fashioned when it came to the Marut
design - While Prof. KW Tank was a very good designer, he did not know much
about production technology to minimize manufacturing time, costs and time or
to ensure maintainability. Kurt Tank belonged to the old school, suspicious of
new technology such as powered controls. Rather reluctantly he decided to power
the controls but only with a single hydraulic system, including the services
such as wheel brakes, undercarriage, flaps, and airbrakes. Tank’s
well-advertised boast was that his aircraft would be so strong that if the wing
hit a tree, the tree would get sliced off with the aircraft capable of flying
back home. There is also a funny mention of how the cockpit was designed
for a much larger man. Bhargava found the seat too big for his small bottom
(Tank was a large man) and the controls too far, and thus a redesign was needed
for the Indian. There are also interesting mentions of the Tank’s chat with
Nehru and the test flight with Krishna Menon as a witness.
Perhaps age had caught up, but it is quite clear that after
the engine issues, the HAL production team had many changes to grapple with and
difficulties with large-scale production planning, all of which were not in
Tank’s hands. Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, squabbles with the IAF, and the
lack of advanced facilities. However, all said, many disagree that the HF 24
was a failure, for this aircraft did enter a production stage, served in the
IAF for over two decades, and proved itself in a war. Moreover, its accident
rate was very low—just one accident and around three aircraft lost in combat.
From a lofty performance goal, which it tried to meet, and a cost overrun, the
HF 24 was indeed a failure, but that was all because it could not get the
engine it was designed for, and the nonexistent large-scale manufacturing and
production engineering facilities, which were not factored for during budgeting.
As the MIG 21 local assembly project was finding difficulties
getting off the ground, Tank completed his HF 24 project with the OR 703
engines, though not meeting the original lofty Mach 2 speed objective, and was
ready with deliveries to the IAF. He finished his contract with the Indian
government in April 1967 and decided to hang up his boots, for good.
During the 1971 India-Pakistan war, the Marut acquired a
sterling record for rugged reliability as a low-altitude fighter bomber. This
was one of the planes that saved the day in the 1971 Longewala battle – remember the famous
scene pictured in the film Border, where Jackie Shroff and his planes finally
take off at dawn and blow away the bogged-down Pakistani tank unit with a small
Indian contingent led by Brigadier Kuldip Singh Chandpuri desperately trying to
hold on? If the Pakistanis broke through, Jaisalmer would fall. The planes
could not operate during that sleepless night, since they were not equipped for
night fighting, but they took off at the break of dawn, with the Maruts and Hunters
decimating the Pakistani tank unit. As a Marut pilot recorded - the Marut
remained in the thick of the action throughout the thirteen-day war, strafing
airfields, bombing ammunition dumps, hitting tanks and artillery on the
frontlines, flying over two hundred sorties, and suffering three losses to
ground fire. Nonetheless, the HF-24s boasted a high serviceability rate and
proved quite tough, with several of the jets managing to return to base on just
one engine after the other was shot up.
Back to Kurt Tank - there is this mention that he taught initially
at the Madras Institute of Technology MIT at Madras. After Tank arrived in India, funding approval by
the Indian government proved to be very slow, so Tank was parked at the Madras
Institute of Technology for a while, moving to HAL only later in 1956. There is
little detail of his time at MIT, but we can see a mention by the late Indian
President APJ Abdul Kalam in his book that he had been Prof Kurt Tank’s
student. Kurt Tank worked under Austrian Prof Walter Repenthein who headed the
aeronautical department at MIT. Who knows if Tank taught Kalam Bernoulli’s principle,
the foundation for all aeronautical engineers and aviators! Kalam as you all
know grew up to become the nation’s foremost rocket and missile engineer, and
eventually the head of the armed forces and the President of India. I am sure
Kurt Tank would have been proud to hear that, but it all happened after Tank’s
demise!
He was indeed an interesting man with clear ideas- for
example, he believed that one could if required, communicate with extra-terrestrials
through geometry, simply because, to design a spaceship, one had to know the
Pythagoras theorem! According to a senior airman, he had this dictum - "A
plane should not be a racehorse, that can turn in a wonderful performance on
the track only at certain times and in just the right conditions: a plane
should be a cavalry horse, that can run and fight in all conditions, good or
bad, and that does not need to be pampered or spoilt – a plane should be like a
Dienstpferd, a cavalry horse." This was the Tank Dienstpferd design
policy.
Tank spent the rest of his life in Munich and briefly
consulted for MBB. He did not forget India, In 1967, he tried to convince the West
German government to manufacture the HF 24 under license in Germany, but after
Nehru died in 1964, there were no takers in India. He suggested in 1972 that
HAL cooperate with MBB when a new spec for the ASA design came up, that the new
HF 73 design could potentially use the RB.199 34R engine, and beat the MIG 25
performance, but the project was dropped again due to non-availability of the engine.
Kurt Tank fell seriously ill and passed away in Munich, on June 5, 1983, aged
85. Air Marshal LM Kartre visited Munich to pay his condolences to Tank’s
bereaved wife Sigrid and upon her request, donated an HF 24 to the Deutsches
Museum, where it is displayed proudly, to this day.
The MIG 21, French Mirage, the MIG 29, The British Jaguar, etc.
were inducted afterwards, so also the locally built Tejas (with US-GE engines),
and India is now talking about buying even more advanced planes such as the
Rafale. As usual, the world spends billions on deterrence, be it traditional
armaments or nuclear technology, with the increase in threat perceptions and
the resulting cost of defense and deterrence.
Strange, that the modern world continues to move ahead on a
road built upon mistrust. If we went ahead however on a road built upon trust,
all this money could have been used for better purposes, but that everybody is
going to tell me, is impractical and utopian thinking.
Design for Flight: The Kurt Tank Story - Heinz Conradis
Designer-Pilot Kurt Tank - by Stephan Wilkinson (history-net)
Self-reliance and Self-sufficiency: Experience of the Indian aircraft industry, Thesis 1983 - Ravindra Tomar
A man with a wide horizon Nicolussi Leck - Gerald Steinacher (A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe - edited by David A. Messenger, Katrin Paehler)
Why India is not a great power yet – Bharat Karnad
Operation Damocles – Roger Howard
Hunting Evil – Guy Walters
Kurt Tank: Konstrukteur und Testpilot bei Focke - Wulf– Wagner W, English, Trans 1998: Don Cox
Conversations With: Reimar Horten - David Myhra
A Technological History of Cold-War India, 1947–1969 - William A.T. Logan
Note: I
admire Kurt Tank as an engineer, also due to my interest in flight, and Tank’s
work for India. This does not mean I condone his previous relations with the
Nazi regime or the Fw use of slave labor, I abhor those actions, emphatically.
HAPPY ONAM to all readers
