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The Indian Air Force has completed a successful drop trial of the Khagantak-243, an indigenously designed long-range glide bomb, and said the weapon met its trial objectives.
The weapon was released from a Sukhoi Su-30MKI fighter and is designed for stand-off attack, striking targets without the launch aircraft entering hostile air defence cover.
It has a reported stand-off range of more than 140 km when released from an altitude of about 12 km, and carries a 125 kg Mk-81 class blast-fragmentation warhead in a 300 kg total system.
Mid-course guidance combines an Inertial Navigation System with jamming-resistant satellite navigation; terminal guidance can use an electro-optical/infrared seeker or a passive homing head.
It is being co-developed by JSR Dynamics, a Nagpur-based private defence firm, with Bharat Electronics Limited supplying the electronics and guidance subsystems.
A glide bomb is an air-launched weapon with no engine of its own. After release it deploys wings or control surfaces and converts the aircraft's speed and altitude into gliding range, steering itself to the target under inertial and satellite guidance. Because the launch aircraft can release it tens or hundreds of kilometres away, the pilot never has to fly into the envelope of enemy surface-to-air missiles. That is what stand-off means: the shooter stands off from the defended area. The trade-off is that range depends on release altitude and speed, so the same weapon flies much further when dropped from 12 km than from low level.
Simple Analogy: It is the difference between walking up to a target and throwing a stone, and throwing a paper plane from a rooftop that steers itself down to where you aimed it.
Nagpur-based private defence firm; designed the bomb body, glide wings and control systems
Navratna Defence PSU under the Ministry of Defence; supplied the electronics and guidance subsystems
User service; conducted the drop trial and will integrate the weapon on its fighter fleet
DRDO's Gaurav LRGB was flight-tested from a Su-30MKI in August 2024 and put through further release trials in April 2025 - the same class of weapon and the same launch platform, but developed by a government laboratory rather than a private firm.
Khagantak-243 is led by a private firm with a Defence PSU as electronics partner. The private sector supplied 45.16% of India's record defence exports of Rs 38,424 crore in FY 2025-26.
Indigenous precision munitions reduce dependence on imported stand-off weapons, one of the stated aims of the self-reliance push in defence manufacturing.
The Su-30MKI is the IAF's heavyweight multirole fighter and the standard integration platform for new indigenous air-launched weapons because of its payload and range.
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A weapon released far enough from the target that the launch platform stays outside the reach of the defender's air defences.
A self-contained navigation system using accelerometers and gyroscopes; it needs no external radio signal and so cannot be jammed.
A terminal seeker that homes on energy emitted by the target itself, such as radar or infrared emissions, without radiating any signal of its own.
The radius of a circle within which half the rounds aimed at a target are expected to fall; a standard measure of weapon accuracy.