Touching the sky with glory

By Air Vice Marshal Manmohan Bahadur (retd)

India’s air warriors celebrate their 93rd anniversary today. As they take another step towards their centenary, it is apt to look back on a very eventful year. We veterans recently got a glimpse of where the Indian Air Force is headed at a gathering hosted for us by the men and women in blue at Air Force Station Pune — a premier base that I first visited way back in 1975 as a cadet at the National Defence Academy.

That day is etched in my memory. As we Air Force cadets boarded buses to move to the Pune airbase for our Camp Greener (now called Garuda), the Army cadets cast envious looks our way as they climbed into trucks bound for Shivaji’s fort, Torna—from which their ‘outing’ derived its name, Camp Torna. Theirs was to be a ragda in the rolling hills and valleys around Pune, while ours was a visit to operational squadrons. Looking back, the link between then and now feels symbolic. We 20-year-old wannabe flyers went wide-eyed as we looked at, touched and even sat in the cockpit of the iconic MiG-21.

That fighter was the cynosure of all media coverage of the recently concluded 1971 war – the gleaming aluminium airframe, the pointed nose cone that meant business, and the engine exhaust that blew our senses away as a few took to the Pune skies with roaring afterburners. Fast-forward to 2025, and just a fortnight ago the IAF bid farewell at Chandigarh to that very icon that had guarded our skies and taken the fight to the adversary for decades. It had done one more task – training generations of young fighter pilots to man our skies and graduate to more sophisticated machines.

The gathering at the verdant Pune Air Force Station could not have been more symbolic. Among those present was a retired IAF chief who, remarkably, could be called a youngster, for in the gathering sat a wizened old air warrior commissioned a decade and a half before him! The big screen flashed glimpses of the IAF's exploits through the years—the biplane Tiger Moth, the Dakota, and the Mi-4 helicopter giving way to the MiGs, the Rafale, the C-17 Globemaster, and the Apache helicopters. A rock band comprising young officers soon had everyone on their feet – the young, the not-so-young, and the not-so-old (!) hitting the dance floor to the iconic Yeh aasmaan hai mera…

But the icing on the cake was the full-throated rendering of the Air Force song by all. For us air warriors, it came as second nature, yet it was the glistening eyes and moist handkerchiefs of the veteran ladies that brought home the gravitas of the occasion – the years they spent looking after the home, children and family while we were at work, on the ground or in the skies. Hats off to them – they are silent air warriors in their own right.

Air Warriors, here’s wishing you happy landings as you continue to ‘Touch the Sky with Glory!’