India's Nirbhay (Fearless) long-range cruise missile successfully completed a test-flight for the first time on 14 October, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) said in a statement.
The 1,000 km-class cruise missile, which the DRDO describes as "India's first indigenously designed and developed long-range sub-sonic cruise missile", was launched from the Integrated Test Range (ITR) at Balasore in Odissa state at 10:05 h local time.
The flight lasted a little over 1 hour and 10 minutes and covered a distance of more than 1,000 km. "The entire mission, from lift-off until the final splash down, was a perfect flight achieving all the mission objectives," the DRDO statement said.
DRDO chief Avinash Chander said that the missile had achieved an accuracy of more than 10 m. "The successful indigenous development of the Nirbhay cruise missile will fill a vital gap in the warfighting capabilities of our armed forces," he added.
The Nirbhay's first flight on 12 November 2012 had to be cut short when a glitch in the cruise missile's inertial navigation system caused the missile to stray from the planned flightpath after it had flown a distance of 250 km at Mach 0.7: about a quarter of the planned distance.
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