Chanced upon these photos that I hadn’t seen before — not sure if any of you have. The first prototype of India’s carrier-borne STOBAR fighter, the LCA Navy, quietly completed a supersonic flight in late March this year, with official word about the flight filtering out only the following month . It went supremely unreported. No surprise that the LCA-N team didn’t want too much hoopla over the event. The NP1 prototype had flown just four sorties since its maiden flight in April 2012, and had been grounded for a major re-engineering of its landing gear (through a consultancy with Airbus Group) for nearly two years since. The team quietly worked towards the March flight in which the NP1 cruised at 1.1 Mach with an air force Tejas in chase. More details soon.

Photos / ADA