IAF chief and woman pilot may fly MiG-21s at send-off ceremony

NEW new delhi: The stirring and regal send-off planned by the amerindic transmit ram for the last of its iconic Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 fighter jets at the Chandigarh air force station on September 26 will feature chief of the air staff Air Chief Marshal AP Singh and a woman fighter pilot Squadron Leader Priya Sharma among others, putting the spotlight on a storied past and marking the dawn of a new chapter in the world’s fourth largest air force, officials aware of the matter said on Tuesday.MiG-21s belonging to the IAF’s No. 23 Squadron, also known as “Panthers”, will fly for the last time in two different formations at the decommissioning ceremony, bringing the curtain down on a 62-year journey, the officials said, asking not to be named. The induction of the MiG-21, India’s first supersonic air combat interceptor, began in 1963, a year before Singh was born.“The IAF chief and the woman officer will be among the fighter pilots who will be flying MiG-21s in the three-aircraft Badal formation and the five-aircraft Panther formation,” said one of the officials cited above. Honouring the enduring legacy of the Soviet-origin fighter, Singh flew a combat sortie weeks ago at the sprawling Nal desert fighter base in Rajasthan in a formation led by Sharma --- the air force called it a defining moment laden with “tradition and transformation”.”Apart from MiG-21s, the fighter jets that will take part in the ceremony include the Jaguars and the locally produced Tejas light combat aircraft (LCA Mk-1), said another official.The MiG-21’s 62-year history in IAF has been punctuated by frequent fatal crashes that have put the aircraft’s safety record under running scrutiny and led to an understandable chorus of concern and calls for its early replacement. With upgrades, IAF has managed to keep them flying for so long.The Badal formation will be led by the IAF chief --- Singh will come in and land, and the other two MiG-21s will break formation and climb up to simulate a combat air patrol, the officials said. The second formation, called Panther, will capture India’s oldest fighter plane passing the baton to its newest.The Panther formation will involve three MiG-21s flanked by two LCA Mk-1 fighters, with the MiGs peeling off before they can fly over the dais and the LCAs streaking across the Chandigarh skies in formation, they said.A formation of Jaguar fighters is expected to simulate a base strike during the ceremony, HT has learnt.More than 400 MiG-21s have been involved in accidents that have claimed the lives of around 200 pilots, earning the fighter jets unfortunate epithets such as “Flying Coffin” and “Widow Maker”. To be sure, more MiG-21s have crashed than any other fighter because they formed the bulk of the aircraft in IAF’s inventory for the longest time --- the different variants of the aircraft progressively inducted by the air force added up to almost 900 planes.A former IAF chief once referred to the seat in the MiG-21 cockpit as “more coveted than that of a king’s.”“Heed not the barbed taunt of ‘widow-maker‘ my lovely filly, for you are in fact a man-maker of boys. Were I to go down with you, my soul would have been tortured to have anyone call you my ‘flying-coffin’; but my soul would have been mercifully becalmed would that our joint epitaph proudly proclaimed: ‘In life you offered this pilot a seat more coveted than that of a king’s, in death you took an air warrior to his glorious Valhalla,” Air Chief Marshal AY Tipnis wrote in a piece published in the book First to the Last: 50 years of MiG-21s with the IAF published in 2013.