BENGALURU: The National Aeronautics Laboratories NAL )-developed Saras aircraft on Wednesday completed a successful first flight in its new avatar. The new upgraded version of the plane, development of which was nearly scrapped after its first crash in March 2009, is a 14-seater and was in the skies for 40 minutes.The SARAS PT1N (14 seater) flight on Wednesday was commanded by Wing Commander UP Singh, Group Captain RV Panicker and Group Captain KP Bhat from the Indian Air Force ’s Aircraft and Systems Testing Establishment (ASTE).“The aircraft took off at about 11am from HAL airport and flew at the maximum height of 8,500 ft at the speed of 145 knots. The chase aircraft (KIRAN) was piloted by Group Captain Badrish and telemetry was commanded by Group Captain Naraynen, Wing Commander Pandey and Wing Commander R Sridhar (retd),” an official statement read.All the system parameters were found to be normal and the team claimed a text book flight. NAL, a Council of Scientific & Industrial Research ( CSIR ) lab, had a young team of 40 scientists and engineers working on the project for the past nine months.The primary objective is to evaluate the system performance in about 20 flights and the data collected from this shall be used to freeze the design of production version aircraft.“The production version aircraft will be of 19 seat capacity and will undergo both civil and military certification,” the statement added.NAL Director Jitendra Jadhav had told TOI that the modified Saras will have a configurable configuration. “While the design is for a 14-seater plane, it can be configured to accommodate 19 people. The final product will be taken care of by the IAF , but we will need this much money for the prototypes,” he had said while claiming that manufacturing of two Limited Series Prototypes alone will require Rs 400 crore to Rs 500 crore.The Saras programme had come crashing down after an accident in 2009. The original design included a maximum take-off weight of 6,100kg and a maximum payload of 1,232kg. The first prototype which completed its maiden flight on May 29, 2004, was overweight at 5,118kg compared to the 4,125kg design specifications.