Official Statement On India’s Nirbhay Cruise Missile Test Today

There’s been some speculation over today’s aborted Nirbhay subsconic cruise missile test. Here’s the first official word on it from the MoD:
Long Range Subsonic tactical cruise missile [Nirbhay] was launched from Integrated Test Range, Chandipur at 11:38 hrs today. All initial critical operations: Booster ignition, Booster separation, Wing deployment and engine start were successfully executed and Nirbhay reached the desired cruise altitude. During 700 seconds of flight all the subsystems of Nirbhay cruise missile functioned satisfactorily and met all the desired functions. The mission was aborted after 700 seconds of flight.


Today’s test was the Nirbhay’s third. The weapon system had its first successful and complete test in October last year after an abortive debut test-firing in March 2013. It isn’t clear yet if the technical snags that forced an abort today were the same that caused a flight deviation in the first test in 2013. The abort during the first test took place roughly 17 minutes into the flight. Today’s abort took place after about 11.7 minutes. Will update this post when there’s more detail in.

10 thoughts on “Official Statement On India’s Nirbhay Cruise Missile Test Today”

  1. What about sub launched Nirbhay test? Anyway ground test was failure so better……Russian kalibr cruise missile negotiated 187 way points during 1500 km range and hit targets in Syria , same time altitute from surface varies from 800 meters to 1300 meters. Nirbhay has same range so long way needs to go before perfection.

  2. There are many failures in testing. Its a known phenomena. Dont read too much into it. They just need to keep on testing

  3. NSR says —

    Not easy to master the design and development of this cruise missile weapon system…

    The navigation is only as good as the reference points it gets from satellites or other sources…

    Whatever is the reason, please keep fixing the problems and testing it until all the kinks are ironed out…

    No one sells that kind of weapon systems…so double up and keep going…

  4. another 40 years test cricket like Tejas program……….. 🙂

    how much money made for directors and IAS lobby ?? can someone estimate ….

    DRDO should changes its mission objective to : "Never Ending Indian Defense Testing Center"

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