'What's on offer for India is to establish a production line here that would be the world's only production line.'
In rebranding the F-16 into the F-21, Lockheed Martin appears to have accepted what many have warned it for years: That the IAF would never buy a fighter whose very name is associated across India with the Pakistan Air Force which has operated the F-16 since the 1980s.
With both aircraft likely to meet the IAF's performance requirements, the winning bid could be the one that offers the lowest cost and the best industrial proposal.
Lockheed Martin's offer involves transferring the world's only F-16 production line from Fort Worth, Texas, to India. Thereafter, every F-16 built, and a large share of the spare parts and sub-systems for every F-16 flying across the globe would come from India.
James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas Suedhof won the 2013 Nobel Medicine Prize 2013 on Monday for solving the mystery of how the cell organises its transport system. The winners will share equally the prize sum of eight million Swedish kronor (USD 1.25 million), reduced because of the economic crisis last year from the 10 million kronor awarded since 2001.
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