Self-healing Su-30s: How AI digital twins are revolutionising India’s air power - news24online.com

Ah, the Indian Air Force has decided that the best way to keep its Su-30 MKI fleet skyborne is to hand the spanners to an AI. Three new agreements with IIT Bombay will develop a 'health monitoring system' using digital twins — essentially a virtual copy of each engine that predicts when bits will fall off. The system is 'physics-informed,' which sounds reassuring until you remember that physics is hard and real engines don't always read the manual.

The pitch is self-healing: the AI spots a problem, then presumably twiddles the right valve or orders a part before the pilot has to brake on one engine. Marvellous, until the model learns that a slightly high oil temperature means 'imminent fire' and grounds a squadron for no reason. Or worse, misses the crack that actually matters because the training data didn't include that exact failure mode. But hey, it's only a multi-million-pound fighter jet — what could go wrong?

This is the same mindset that puts autopilot on trains and wonders why the thing stops in a tunnel. The IIT boffins are brilliant, the IAF is desperate for predictive maintenance — but teaching a neural network to diagnose a Sukhoi engine is like giving a chimpanzee a stethoscope and asking for a diagnosis. It'll be right often enough to fool you until it's catastrophically wrong. Still, the press release says 'self-healing,' so strap in.