Cavalier India Defence Training Academy

It is expected that the full deliveries of 36 Rafale aircraft will be completed well before April 2022 as announced by Union defence minister Rajnath Singh in Parliament. Another batch of three Rafale fighter jets landed at the Ambala airbase on Thursday, taking the total number of Rafales in the Indian Air Force (IAF) inventory to 23. According to people aware of the development in Dassault, four aircraft were supposed to take off from Merignac-Bordeaux airbase in France on May 20, but only three could because of the unavailability of more mid-air refuellers in the UAE. Although four Rafale Omni role fighters were supposed to leave on May 20, the flights were rescheduled due to maintenance issues with the mid air refuellers. The fighters could only take off today due to long weekend holidays in France, the people cited above said. The IAF is all set to resurrect the 101 “Falcons of Chamb” squadron at Hashimara in West Bengal. It is expected that the full deliveries of 36 Rafale aircra...

India and the UAE are expected to take bilateral ties to the next level with the two countries, along with France, discussing conducting trilateral military exercises PM Narendra Modi has led India's effort to deepen ties with UAE and other Gulf countries after he came to power in 2014. At a meeting of the  consultative committee of the external affairs ministry  on January 16, foreign minister S Jaishankar had underscored India’s deepening relationship with Gulf countries. He had told the Congress MPs that it was due to the intense efforts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that  India’s relationship with Gulf countries  had gone way beyond diaspora and energy as in the past. The state of the relationship will be on display later this month when the United Arab Emirates Air Force will handle the mid-air refuelling of India’s three Rafale fighter jets flying into the Indian Air Force station at Ambala from France, people familiar with the matter said. The UAE air force’...

The IAF now operate seven Russian IL-76 M refuellers with Pakistan acquiring four of the same refuellers from Ukraine and China operating three of the same Russian refuellers along with 10 vintage modified versions of Russian bombers. According to officials at South Block , while the IAF wanted to get an Airbus 330 MRTT on wet lease from a British company, the French proposal involves selling six 5-7-year-old aircraft to the IAF with a certification of another 30 years of platform life at a much reduced price. The IAF has been eager to acquire an MRTT over the past decade, with the previous request for proposal (RFP) expiring without any results. According to a former Indian Air Force chief who didn’t want to be named, the Airbus 330 MRTT platform has much larger wings of the Airbus 340m as a result of which the aircraft can refuel two fighters mid-air at the same time through drogues (attached to wing pods) or a central refuelling boom system. The best part about the Airbus aircraft...