NDA to have better equipment for training

PUNE: In keeping with the upgradation process of its service training, the National Defence Academy (NDA) here will procure latest equipment for all the defence wings.
Giving details about it, NDA commandant Lieutenant General A K Chopra said: "The naval cadets will get new boats, the air force cadets will get simulator and the army cadets will get to know about new sophisticated equipment very soon.This will help them in upgrading their knowledge."
The flight simulator will have the Cockpit-Motion Facility and it would be a representative of a state-of-the-art advanced subsonic airplane. The Navy will also have a static frigate placed a Peacock Bay which will have all the equipments. "It will look like a ship and the cadets will have first hand knowledge on how to operate it except its movement," Gen Chopra said. The army cadets will be able to handle most of the new equipment used by the Infantry and get familiarised with it.
Recently the Indian Navy had also decided to give the NDA cadets J24 class boats which are ocean-going sail boats and they can sustain a crew of five to six. Also known as Offshore Sailing Crafts, these boats are generally used for long sailing along the coast.
"We have a large fleet of Enterprise class and a few Laser and Optimists boats. These are absolutely ideal and they teach all the young men all about the watermanship activities and they are time tested and excellent," he said.
"We have started an interaction with the three training academies — Air Force Academy in Hyderabad, the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun and the Naval Academy in Goa — where our cadets go after they pass out from here. This interaction will give us an idea what their requirements are," he said.
"Besides this, the Academy has been having progressive interaction with foreign defence academies and in that light we had sent our delegations to the US and Australia. Likewise we also had many visits of foreign delegations in past six months."
The NDA has also mooted a proposal for Campus Area Network and which can give connectivity to each cadet and that their learning would be easier, he said.
Gen Chopra reiterated the fact that the NDA still has a deficiency of 54 permanent officers (academic). "The UPSC has advertised in the newspapers. In the first phase we will recruit 18 teaching staff — some of them even readers and professors," he added.