India aims to be a $5-trillion economy by 2025 and to do a $25-billion defence manufacturing, of which $5 billion will be aerospace and defence exports. The best way Lohia Group can contribute to the ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ (Self-Reliant India) call of the Indian government is to become a globally recognised company for exceptional delivery standards of marque products in the composite’s domain. With an amalgamation of high-end technology and their manufacturing expertise, Lohia aims to establish India as a leading exporter of customised composite products to customers worldwide.
For this purpose, the Lohia Aerospace Systems (Lohia) through its Aerospace and Defence unit in Kanpur and Israel, intends to contribute in the effort by becoming a leading exporter of customised composite products to global customers. With capacities and capabilities to design and manufacture composite products for the aerospace and defence sectors and an engineering manufacturing legacy of 50 years, the Lohia Aerospace Systems offers a wide range of composite products, through its best-in-class manufacturing facilities in two countries.
The company’s composite experts have more than 100 years of combined experience in manufacturing composite components for the aviation, military and aerospace sector. Lohia Aerospace’s products are customised to suit stringent client requirements and delivered to meet highest quality standards for commercial, military and space applications.
“A key contributing factor to our success story is our people. Composites is a highly technical field with challenging process requirements. All depends on the people working on the production floor. Leveraging the abundance of strong technical minds in our state and country, we have been able to create an ecosystem for best in class and trend setting technical training programmes nationally. The company’s focus is on creating high performance composite components for the most challenging of industries,” said Anurag Lohia, CEO, Lohia Aerospace Systems.
In 2019, Lohia Aerospace started its journey into the aerospace and defence sector with the acquisition of Israel-based Light & Strong (L&S) Limited. Specialising in aerospace composite components production, L&S’s established pedigree in military technology manufacturing is a synergistic fit with Lohia’s decades long large-scale manufacturing expertise. In August 2019, Lohia began construction of India’s largest greenfield aerospace composites facility in Uttar Pradesh and in October, initiated the on-the-job training of LAS technicians at their Israeli facility. In June-July 2020, the construction of their 8,000 square metre facility was completed with the commissioning of their plant.
Supporting the Indian government’s ‘Make in India and for the World’ call, Lohia was the first company to start production/manufacturing in the Uttar Pradesh defence corridor, and became a partner to Indian growth story in the A&D sector. The Lohia Group’s companies inherit a rich heritage of manufacturing excellence. Lohia Group is a diversified conglomerate with interests in aerospace, automotive, machine building and textiles, with global manufacturing footprint in nine countries spread across four continents, with offices in 20 nations and customers in over 90 countries.
Lohia Aerospace Systems supplies composite parts and assemblies for large cargo aircraft. Apart from supplying the prepreg layups and glass epoxy parts, Lohia has also been design partners for some of the programs. With the stringent quality standards of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ground forces, the entire frame of the mini–Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (mini-UAV) is crafted from the finest quality carbon fibre and can withstand extreme conditions. Lohia Aerospace Systems’ exacting precision standards makes it the single source supplier of state-of-the-art loitering systems. The loitering systems are built to rigorous specifications of Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) customers which are used effectively in frontline battlefields.
“We supply payloads, magazines and radomes (from air, space, submerged to naval and ground) to the leaders in aerospace and defence sector. We are proud partners to Israel’s and India’s space programmes, having supplied the crucial carbon composite landing legs and solar panel frames on satellites. We hope to grow Lohia Aerospace into a world-renowned brand in all things composite. Our decade long heritage in participating in global A&D programmes through manufacturing and strong project management has made us pioneers in our field,” said Anurag Lohia, CEO, Lohia Aerospace Systems.
Lohia Group delivers unparalleled manufacturing expertise working with international quality standards. With manufacturing setups across countries, the company’s specialist teams work on industry defined systems and platforms. Lohia Aerospace System has manufacturing presence in Israel and India providing their customer risk mitigation given the availability of production in 2 geographies.
Both the company’s facilities strategically serve customers globally, through symbiotic synergies in technology support and value manufacturing. The two facilities span a total of 11,000 sqm. With over 100 skilled technicians, the company follows paperless internet of things (IOT) manufacturing and Enterprise Resource Planning-based processes to optimize and automate their operations.
The Israel facility was established in 2007 and the manufacturing unit is based in an aerospace standard-certified 4,000 sqm facility with class 100,000 clean rooms, wet lay-up rooms, autoclaves, ovens, CNS milling centre, paint shop, 900 sqm of warehouse and AS 9100 D certification. The key strengths at the Israel facility include an exclusive focus on aerospace and military sectors, an in-house dedicated design and engineering team with strong industry and experience, and various manufacturing technologies including Prepreg layup, Wet layup, LRI (Liquid Resin Infusion).
At the Indian facility, the brand-new manufacturing unit in Kanpur, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, is designed as the centre for every composite requirement. Spanning 7,500 sqm in a campus of 25,000 sqm, Lohia Aerospace System is the first company situated in the proposed Uttar Pradesh Defence corridor to start production and becoming India’s youngest aerospace company to be NADCAP certified.
Committed to building on their foundation, the unit’s key highlights include one-stop solution centre for every composite need, fully integrated laboratory to monitor and test. From incoming raw material inspection to Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) and final product testing, the only aerospace composite components manufacturer with live production in the proposed Uttar Pradesh Defence Corridor, offering multiplier offset benefits as an MSME, and every team member undergoes on-the-job training at the Israel facility. On their return, the technicians now have world-class quality expertise. The company has also sent their employees to be trained at their various customer’s facility in the US, Israel and Germany.
Being a key participant in the Indian aerospace and defence sector, Lohia Aerospace Systems aims to become a successful vehicle for executing offset obligations of global companies through this endeavour. By being a certified MSME company we provide multiplier benefits for offset sourcing from us.
“All our employees are also trained in our Israeli facilities to bring home knowledge and expertise of the aerospace sector. Combined with decades of manufacturing experience, Lohia Aerospace System produces only the best. Lohia Aerospace System strives to provide the best-in-class engineering design services to its customers and undertake design and development projects with partner clients,” added Anurag Lohia. Lohia’s component and tooling are designed and manufactured to meet distinct mission requirements while delivering cost optimization.
The company’s proven track record in design excellence and its applications and integration in aerospace, defence and military discipline is a key differentiator and the roll-call in the market with most of the projects being awarded on a nomination basis. The company has a history of working on critical strategic projects for our partners with a reputation of being solution providers under the most stringent of conditions.
“By leveraging the Israeli know-how in military technology manufacturing, Lohia Aerospace System brings high-end key technologies in the aerospace and defence composites domain to India. We aim to take India’s vision of ‘Make in India’ and ‘Skill India’ to the next level by establishing India as a leading exporter of customised composite products to global OEMs. Due to our ability to execute high volume orders in short bursts we are able to support our demanding customers in terms of timelines and specifications,” concluded Mr. Anurag Lohia, CEO, Lohia Aerospace Systems.
