Hindustan Aeronautics Limited announced that D K Sunil has assumed the charge of Director (Engineering and R&D) of the Company on 29th September, 2022. Education/Qualification BE (ECE) from Osmania University, Hyderabad - 1987 M.Tech (A/c Prod. Engg.), from IIT, Madras - 1991 Ph.D (Electronics Science), from University of Hyderabad - 2019 Career in HAL Dr. D. K. Sunil started his career in HAL as a 22nd Batch Management Trainee in 1987.

At the end of 72 weeks of training, he bagged two rolling trophies as All- round management trainee and Best Public speaker. During the initial career he worked in production, quality and customer support issues at the Hyderabad Avionics division. In 1993 he was involved in the certification of the first Airborne Radio for the Light Combat Aircraft which went on to fly successfully.

He was part of a team that built the first Secure Radio for the MiG- 21 Upgrade programme in the year 2000, which was successfully certified in Russia and subsequently productionised in large numbers. In 2005 he was given the challenge of replacing an imported radio system on ALH and the ACS 235 secure radio was designed and productionised in 2010 and it is the mainstay of the Army's ALH fleet. He was Programme Manager for Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft for Avionic equipment to be designed at SLRDC.

Under his leadership new technologies were developed like High Power Radar Power supply, Voice Activated Control System, Combined Interrogator Transponder which have become new growth areas for the company. He also pioneered collaboration with IIT Kanpur for datalinks and IIIT, Hyderabad for voice recognition technologies. In 2016 he moved to Mission Combat Systems R&D Centre in Bengaluru where he lead teams working on Active ESA Radar, Automatic Flight Control System for LCH and Mission Computers for helicopter and fighter platforms. The Flight Control System for LCH was being developed indigenously for the first time in the country and flight safety issues were paramount.

He had the unique experience of melding the efforts of four R&D centres of HAL to achieve this goal. In the last few years, he has focussed on new areas such as Engine Control Systems, Design Perspective Plan and improving collaboration with IITs and startups for new technologies. He has lead design projects at equipment level as well at system level for aircraft and helicopter.

His experience covers the whole range of design activities pursued at HAL design centres from LRU to aircraft level. He was selected for Leadership Development Programme in 2014.He was promoted as Chief Designer, SLRDC in July 2021, assumed the office of General Manager, SLRDC in June 2022 and taken over as Director (Engg and R&D) from 29/09/2022.