When Kurt Tank arrived in Bangalore in August 1956, the man who had designed the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 found a design office of 54 people. Three of them were senior design engineers, and two of those were already busy with a jet trainer. There was no proper prototype machine shop, no static test rigs and no flight test laboratory.

His brief was to build India a Mach 2 fighter. What came out of Bangalore five years later was the HAL HF-24 Marut, the first jet fighter designed and built in India. It never went supersonic in any meaningful way, it was criticised for most of its life, and in December 1971 its pilots took it to war and brought it home again and again.

A German designer in Bangalore

The project began in 1956, when Hindustan Aircraft took on three big jobs for the Aeronautica militare indiana at once: licence production of the British Folland Gnat, a new basic trainer that became the HJT-16 Kiran, and the most ambitious of all, an indigenous supersonic fighter. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government backed it as a way to build a modern aircraft industry.

HAL lacked the experience, so it hired it. Tank had designed the Fw 190, the Fw 200 Condor and, after the war, the Pulqui II jet fighter in Argentina. He came to India with a German assistant and set about designing not just an aircraft, but the industrial base needed to build one.

The airframe took shape quickly. A full-scale two-seat wooden glider, the HAL X-241, was towed into the air behind a Douglas Dakota in April 1959 to test the aerodynamics. On 17 June 1961, Wing Commander Suranjan Das took the first powered prototype aloft. The new fighter was named Marut, after the storm gods of the Rig Veda.

Military historian Ed Nash on the HAL HF-24 Marut and Kurt Tank’s Indian fighter.

The engine that never came

The Marut was designed around a pair of afterburning Bristol Orpheus BOr-12 engines. Then the British government withdrew its funding for that engine, India declined to pay for it alone, and the project died. HAL had to fit the Marut with the non-afterburning Orpheus 703, the same engine it was already building for the Gnat, with roughly 44 per cent less thrust.

That single decision shaped everything that followed. The jet built to fly at Mach 2 could barely reach Mach 1. Over the 1960s India hunted for alternatives, testing a Marut with Egypt’s Brandner E-300 engine and even trying Soviet engines, but nothing worked. Once India agreed in August 1962 to buy the MiG-21, the Marut’s interceptor role was quietly dropped.

What remained was a twin-engined, single-seat strike fighter with four 30 mm Aden cannons, a retractable pack of 50 unguided 68 mm rockets and four underwing hardpoints. On 1 April 1967, No. 10 “Dagger” Squadron became the first unit to fly it.

The pilots who loved her anyway

Many Indian Air Force officers were unimpressed. By the time the Marut entered service, the IAF already flew Hawker Hunters and Soviet Su-7s, and a fighter only marginally better than the Hunter was a hard sell. The men who actually flew it saw things differently. According to correspondent Pushpindar Chopra, they nicknamed it the “Hunter Mk 2” and praised its control response, aerobatic ability and steadiness as a gun platform.

It had its quirks. At a 2011 reunion of Marut pilots in Bengaluru, Wing Commander M. W. Tilak recalled losing his canopy during armament firing, twice, and landing safely both times. From then on, he said, colleagues called his sorties the “canopy firing exercise”.

Into battle: December 1971

When war with Pakistan broke out in December 1971, two squadrons flew the Marut, No. 10 and No. 220. Forward-deployed at Uttarlai and Jodhpur, they flew more than 300 combat sorties in two weeks, attacking targets deep in southern Pakistan, including Hyderabad and the railways at Mirpur Khas and Rohri.

On the morning of 5 December, as Pakistani tanks closed on the tiny Indian border post at Longewala, Hawker Hunters from Jaisalmer arrived at first light. Several accounts, including Wikipedia’s, say Maruts flew alongside them in the attacks that broke the armoured column, which Afterburner covered in detail in its story of the Battle of Longewala.

Twin engines turned out to matter. On at least three occasions Maruts came home on one engine after the other was hit by ground fire, once from about 240 kilometres inside hostile territory. When hydraulics were shot out, the flight controls reverted automatically to manual, and pilots flew home that way. Three Marut pilots were awarded the Vir Chakra.

Both sides agree that no Marut was lost in air combat. Indian records credit Squadron Leader K. K. Bakshi of No. 220 Squadron with shooting down a Aeronautica militare pakistana F-86 Sabre on 7 December 1971; Pakistani reports say that Sabre suffered an engine flameout. Losses to ground fire and strafing were small, a handful of aircraft by either side’s count.

Mark Felton on the Pulqui II, the jet fighter Kurt Tank designed in Argentina before he came to India.

The end of the storm

HAL built only around 145 to 147 Maruts, depending on the source, including a small number of two-seat trainers, out of more than 200 planned. After India’s 1974 nuclear test, even spares for the Orpheus became hard to get. Tank designed a true Mach 2 successor, the HF-73, but it died when an engine deal with Rolls-Royce fell through. By 1982 the IAF was proposing to retire the Marut, and the last were withdrawn around 1990.

Critics called it a long-drawn-out failure, and on paper they had a point. But India learned to design a jet fighter on the Marut, the pilots who flew it into Pakistan came home, and when the country tried again decades later, the result was the HAL Tejas. The storm spirit never broke the sound barrier. It did break the idea that India could not build its own fighter.

Sources: Wikipedia (HAL HF-24 Marut; Battle of Longewala), HistoryNet, Hindustan Times, Vintage Aviation News