GE Aerospace has stood up a dedicated F404-IN20 engine line for the Tejas Mk1A, the step it says will clear the propulsion shortage that has kept Hindustan Aeronautics Limited from handing finished fighters to the Indian Air Force. The American manufacturer has folded its in-house lean operating system, which it calls FLIGHT DECK, into the reopened run. GE has committed to shipping 20 to 22 engines by the close of this year and another 30 across the year that follows.

Together that comes to 52 powerplants over two years.

The line matters because the airframes are already built. HAL has assembled and flight tested roughly 30 Mk1A structures that now stand on the factory floor for want of engines, and the company has said plainly that it holds no fallback supplier. Every Mk1A flies on one F404-IN20, made in the United States and shipped to Bengaluru, so the whole programme has run at the pace of a single overseas line. That line has not kept up.

What the F404-IN20 engine line is meant to fix

GE closed the F404-IN20 line around 2016, after finishing an earlier batch of 65 engines for the first Tejas and finding no more on order. HAL's 2021 return forced it to wake a supply chain that had sat dormant for five years, and to do that through the COVID period. Reopening an engine line is slow. This one was slower.

The F404-IN20 is no off-the-shelf F404. It is built to Indian requirement, carrying a higher-flow fan and single-crystal turbine blades, and rated at about 84 kilonewtons in afterburner. A steady F404-IN20 engine line is meant to replace the stop-start trickle of the past two years, giving HAL a flow it can plan production around rather than the occasional single delivery it has worked with since early 2025.

The calendar drives the hurry. The Air Force wants its first full Mk1A squadron operational by March 2027, and no squadron stands up until engines reach the airframes waiting for them.

The delivery gap behind the target

The pledge has to be read against what has actually landed. GE handed HAL its seventh F404-IN20 in the middle of this year. Five of those arrived across 2025 and two in the first half of 2026, and that is the record the 20-to-22 promise is measured against. Reaching the year-end figure would mean shipments climbing steeply through the months that remain.

Some of the earlier slippage traced to a shortage of components from a South Korean supplier feeding the F404 build sequence, the sort of single-node disruption that can stall an engine line for months. HAL's leadership set out the same holdup in talks with GE at Farnborough this month, where the manufacturer said the casting and supplier problems were behind it. Whether the rate holds from here is the open question, and it is the one the Air Force is watching most closely.

The numbers also shift with who is counting. HAL's chairman has set out the ramp in fiscal-year terms, 24 engines in 2026-27 and 30 a year from 2027-28, which the current reporting recasts as 20 to 22 in this calendar year and 30 in the next.

Why GE reopened a dormant line

The scale of the Indian order is what made the outlay worth GE's while. The Air Force signed first for 83 Mk1A fighters on a contract worth about Rs 48,000 crore, then the government cleared 97 more, lifting the planned fleet to 180 aircraft. India now stands as the largest single buyer of the F404-IN20 anywhere in the world, which is the demand signal that justified restarting a line GE had every commercial reason to leave shut.

Behind the airframe orders sit the engine orders. The 2021 contract covered 99 F404-IN20 engines for roughly 716 million dollars. A follow-on signed in late 2025 added 113 more, delivered between 2027 and 2032.

What it means for HAL's build rate

With engines arriving to a schedule, HAL can begin clearing the stockpile. The first batch this year would equip the airframes already standing and send them out to the Air Force. The 30 due next year would let it lift the annual Mk1A rate toward 24 to 30 aircraft, drawing on the assembly lines at Bengaluru and Nashik that it has spent the past two years expanding.

The waiting has not been idle. HAL has widened its assembly footprint and fitted the Mk1A with home-built kit, the Uttam AESA radar, indigenous electronic warfare suites and locally made weapons among them. Predictable engine dates also sharpen the export pitch.

The engines that come after the F404

The F404 stays the backbone of the Mk1A, but the propulsion roadmap already points past it. The heavier Tejas Mk2 will run on the GE F414-INS6, the subject of a separate co-production arrangement between GE and HAL. The fifth-generation AMCA will fly on the F414 in its early blocks before moving to a high-thrust engine built in India for the later ones.