Trial Of India’s First Indigenous Aircraft Carrier (IAC) Vikrant:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the Indian Navy and Cochin Shipyard Limited for the maiden sea trial of India’s first indigenous aircraft carrier (IAC) Vikrant.
- With a planned induction of Vikrant in less than a year, India is set to join a select group of countries having the capability to indigenously design and build an aircraft carrier.
- Vikrant is named after the Majestic-class aircraft carrier which was operated by the Indian Navy from 1961 to 1997.
- IAC-1 has been designed by the Indian Navy’s Directorate of Naval Design (DND), and is being built at Cochin Shipyard Limited (CSL), a public sector shipyard under the Ministry of Shipping.
- This is the first aircraft carrier designed and built in India. An aircraft carrier is one of the most potent marine assets for a nation, which enhances a Navy’s capability to travel far from its home shores to carry out air domination operations.
- India’s earlier aircraft carriers were either built by the British or the Russians.
- The INS Vikramaditya, currently the Navy’s only aircraft carrier that was commissioned in 2013, started out as the Soviet-Russian Admiral Gorshkov.
- The country’s two earlier carriers, INS Vikrant and INS Viraat, were originally the British-built HMS Hercules and HMS Hermes before being commissioned into the Navy in 1961 and 1987 respectively.
