ABSTRACT
While it is true to say that only a small number of NICs have aerospace industries remotely comparable to those present in the AICs, this situation is bound to change in the remaining years of this century. In recent years, a score or more countries have made attempts at entry into the aerospace industry—usually via the upgrading of Tier 3 operations into at least a semblance of Tier 1 airframe work. Already, a good half-dozen NICs have evolved a reasonably broad-based Tier 1 capability which, at its best, enables them to design high-performance aircraft and licence-build advanced technology aeroengines. In the civil aviation field the leading NIC performers are Romania (as recounted in Chapter 3), Indonesia and, above all, Brazil. National aerospace industries capable of producing airliners also embrace India and China, but these countries are so preoccupied with meeting domestic—usually military—requirements that they scarcely figure as serious competitors to the traditional AIC exporters of aircraft. Uniquely for a NIC, Israel straddles two camps, subscribing on the one hand to a civil aviation export thrust as well as maintaining, on the other, a sophisticated indigenous warplane and missile capability. However, most of the less-developed countries (LDCs) that have recently embarked on aircraft production have aimed at fulfilling part of their defence needs (Table 72). The attempts to start up "infant" industries include a number of trials by genuine NICs, especially from among the so-called "Pacific Rim" nations and a clutch of Latin American nations best characterised as having experienced arrested industrial development. The paucity of indigenous design efforts among the products of this group testifies to their dependence on technology transfer from more sophisticated aerospace industries. Indeed, the one attribute shared by all NICs is their continued reliance on the AICs for advanced technology aerospace inputs. Rapid developments in the likes of Brazil and Israel notwithstanding, indigenous design throughout the Third World really only flourishes by virtue of process technologies and parts, systems and engines imported from the US, Western Europe and the USSR.
