India's First Home-Designed Jet Fighter, the HAL HF-24 Marut, Made Its First Flight on 17 June 1961 and Went into Combat with Two Squadrons in December 1971

On 17 June 1961, a twin-engine, swept-wing fighter designed and built in India took off at Bangalore with Wing Commander Suranjan Das at the controls. It was the HAL HF-24, known as the Marut, which IANS renders as “Spirit of the Tempest”. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) went on to build 147 of them: 129 single-seaters and 18 two-seat trainers, according to the account HAL gave at its 50th anniversary event in 2011. In December 1971 two Indian Air Force (IAF) squadrons flew the type against targets in southern Pakistan.

The Marut was the first jet fighter designed in India, and the Press Information Bureau (PIB) still uses it as the reference point for the next one: its 2016 background note on the Tejas says that aircraft came “after technology gap of around two decades of HF Marut”. This article follows the Marut from a 1956 air staff requirement to its place in the HAL museum, and flags each point where the sources give different numbers.

A requirement written for a company that had built no fighter

In 1956 the IAF wanted a replacement for its Hawker Hunters. The requirement, as Guy Aceto’s account in Aviation History sets it out, was for a Mach 2 multirole fighter: a high-altitude interceptor and a low-level strike aircraft, with a ceiling of 60,000 feet and a radius of action of 500 miles, built in India if possible. Mach 2 means twice the speed of sound.

HAL had existed since 1941, and the Indian government took a controlling stake in 1942. By the mid-1950s its jet experience was licence-building de Havilland Vampires. Its design department had 54 Indian staff, only three of them senior design engineers, and no machine shop suited to prototypes, no static test rigs and no flight test laboratory (Aceto). Dr Marshall Michel, a historian of the US 52nd Fighter Wing, adds that there was no hangar space for building prototypes and no suitable runway for flight tests.

HAL brought in Kurt Tank, the German engineer who had designed the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter. Aceto and Bharat Rakshak both date his arrival at Bangalore to August 1956, and Michel says work on the HF-24 began in June 1957. By 1961, Michel counts, HAL had 18 German design engineers, a design department of 150 and a production engineering department of more than 100.

The first test vehicle was a full-size wooden glider, towed aloft by a Douglas DC-3, with the first tow on 1 April 1959 in Aceto’s account. In Bharat Rakshak’s telling the glider completed 86 glides before a nose-wheel failure ended the programme on 24 March 1960. Its trials found a stall warning of only two knots, until a sawtooth on the wing’s leading edge raised it to 28.

17 June 1961 and the road to squadron service

Assembly of the first prototype began in April 1960, and both Aceto and Michel agree on that. Taxi trials in March 1961 ended in an aborted take-off, Bharat Rakshak records, and the second attempt, on 17 June 1961, was flown by Das. Bharat Rakshak puts a second flight, for Defence Minister V.K. Krishna Menon, on 24 June, with the aircraft serial BR 462. The IANS report from HAL’s 2011 event places Menon at the prototype’s flight, so accounts differ on which day he watched. The 17 June date is the one HAL itself marked.

A structural test airframe was finished in November 1961 and a second flying prototype flew in October 1962, Aceto writes. Two pre-production aircraft went to the IAF for service trials on 10 May 1964. No 10 Squadron, the “Daggers”, was formed as the first Marut unit on 1 April 1967, according to Aceto. The squadron dates are one of the places where the record does not agree: Bharat Rakshak has the type entering service with No 10 Squadron in November 1969, and the Centre for Air Power Studies (CAPS) gives April 1967 for No 10 and April 1969 for No 220.

The engine search

Tank designed the Marut for two Bristol Siddeley Orpheus BOr 12 engines, each giving 8,170 pounds of thrust with an afterburner. The British government dropped the BOr 12 programme, and Aceto and Michel both record that India did not pay to continue it. The prototypes and production aircraft flew with the Orpheus 703, a non-afterburning engine of 4,850 pounds of thrust that HAL was already building under licence for the Gnat fighter.

India looked elsewhere for years. Six Soviet Tumansky RD-9F engines, as used in the MiG-19, were imported in late 1961 and rejected in 1963 because they surged and had a short overhaul life (Michel). A collaboration with Egypt on a turbojet called the E-300 followed, in which India gave Egypt a pre-production Marut airframe for flight tests; Egypt cancelled the engine in 1967 (Aceto). In August 1962 India also agreed to buy the MiG-21 from the Soviet Union, which Aceto says covered the Mach 2 interceptor role. HAL then concentrated on the Marut as a low-level strike fighter and a two-seat trainer.

Published top speeds differ. Aceto gives Mach 1.02 at 40,000 feet, Vintage Aviation News gives Mach 0.93 and says the aircraft never exceeded Mach 1, and Bharat Rakshak describes it as able to cruise supersonic at 40,000 feet.

The Gas Turbine Research Establishment (GTRE) worked on an afterburner for the Orpheus 703, according to Bharat Rakshak and Citizen Matters. Das, the pilot of the first flight, died in that reheated-engine test programme. Bharat Rakshak dates it to 10 January 1970 and calls it an engine failure on take-off, while Citizen Matters says only that he died during test trials.

What the Marut carried and what pilots said of it

The Marut Mk 1 had four 30 mm ADEN cannon, the same gun the Hunter carried, a retractable pack of 50 68 mm rockets behind the cockpit, and four underwing points for drop tanks, rockets or up to 4,000 pounds of bombs. Michel adds a Martin-Baker ejection seat that works at zero altitude, and flight controls that revert to manual if the hydraulics fail. IAF pilots called it the “Hunter Mk 2”, according to the correspondent Pushpindar Chopra as Aceto quotes him, and Bharat Rakshak records the nickname “Super Hunter”. Both sources praise its handling, and Aceto says pilots regarded it as a stable gun platform.

Production figures vary slightly. HAL’s account via IANS counts 147 aircraft built between 1964 and 1977. Aceto has 145, including 16 trainers, with production ending in 1974, and Bharat Rakshak counts 18 trainers.

December 1971 from the squadron records

CAPS built a day-by-day account of the Marut’s war from the operations record books of No 10 and No 220 Squadrons. Both squadrons were based at Jodhpur, under Wing Commander Keshev Chandra Aggarwal and Wing Commander Ranjit Dhawan, and operated detachments from Uttarlai airfield. Combat missions began on 4 December 1971, against the Pakistan Air Force airfields at Hyderabad (Sindh) and Nawabshah. For the rest of the war the squadrons flew close air support, interdiction and tactical reconnaissance in the Naya Chor sector, striking the Mirpur Khas railway yard and Pakistani armour.

The squadron records give 140 sorties, 72 by No 10 Squadron and 68 by No 220, with six Pakistani Type 59 tanks destroyed on 6 December and three more on 7 December. Bharat Rakshak puts the total at about 200 sorties. CAPS records three Maruts lost, two to anti-aircraft fire and one destroyed on the ground at Uttarlai on 11 December in a Pakistani Starfighter attack; Bharat Rakshak counts three to ground fire and one on the ground. Both say no Marut was lost in air combat. Pakistan Air Force claims, which differ from the IAF’s, list five Maruts destroyed, three by small-arms fire and two strafed on the ground, as Aceto reports.

The Gazette of India citations of 1972, as reproduced in the Bharat Rakshak gallantry register, record two Vir Chakras that match these squadrons. Wing Commander Aggarwal of No 10 Squadron was cited for locating and destroying two ammunition trains in the Chor and Dhoronaro area on 4 and 8 December, and for destroying a railway engine and fifteen wagons on 6 December. Squadron Leader Krishan Kumar Bakshi of No 220 Squadron was cited for leading a mission over Naya Chor and Dhoran on 6 December, when four Sabres appeared. The citation says that, though outnumbered, he turned to engage them and shot down one. Pakistani records do not acknowledge a Sabre loss in that sector, CAPS notes.

Serviceability was the daily problem. For 1971, CAPS tabulates No 10 Squadron’s serviceability at 17.5 and 28.67 per cent in the first two quarters and No 220’s at about 25 to 32 per cent in the first three. During the 14 days of the war, a system of ferrying aircraft to Jodhpur for major repairs, devised by the Uttarlai technical officer, kept 12 to 15 Maruts available. No 10 Squadron recorded 100 per cent serviceability at Uttarlai.

The Longewala story is told elsewhere on tuput, in the account of the 4 December 1971 night and the Hunter strikes at dawn. Bharat Rakshak says Maruts helped finish the rout of Pakistan’s 22 Cavalry there. CAPS, working from the squadron records, has No 220 Squadron flying an armed reconnaissance near Longewala on the evening of 5 December and finding no armour, which had already withdrawn after the Hunter strikes. The two accounts differ, and the squadron records are the more detailed of them.

About two weeks before the war, Squadron Leader A.K. Sapre of the Aircraft and Armament Testing Unit was killed at Jamnagar when all four cannon were fired at once. CAPS and Bharat Rakshak say the forward guns were restricted afterwards, and Bharat Rakshak says the aircraft was never again cleared for four-gun firing. Michel, by contrast, says the gun vibration problem was fixed before the Maruts went to war.

What HAL and the air force kept from it

At the end of production the Marut had about 80 per cent indigenous content, Michel writes, and HAL was making all its components and had a full design and production team in place. Tank was back in Germany by the time the first squadron formed in 1967, working for Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm, and he drew up a successor in 1973, the HF-73 with Rolls-Royce RB-199 engines. The HF-73 was cancelled when those engines were no longer available, Aceto records.

The type left front-line service in stages. Aceto and Vintage Aviation News give 1990, while Bharat Rakshak says the MiG-23BN replaced it from about 1982. Michel dates the replacement by Jaguars and MiG-23BN and MiG-27 aircraft to the early 1980s. The date varies with the source and with the squadron.

PIB’s 2016 note records that the Tejas first flew on 4 January 2001, more than 39 years after the Marut. HAL now keeps a Marut in the outdoor aircraft park of the HAL Heritage Centre and Aerospace Museum on Old Airport Road in Bengaluru, which reopened on 13 April 2026 after modernisation. Warbirds of India has described the first aircraft visitors meet there as a two-seat Marut Mk 1T, serial D-1695. The museum’s opening hours are 9:00 am to 4:30 pm every day, according to ANI’s report of 10 April 2026.