New Delhi: The Indian Air Force’s MiG-21, the country’s first supersonic fighter and interceptor aircraft, whose induction in the early 1960s catapulted the force into the jet age, will roar in the Indian skies for one last time on Friday, leaving an enduring legacy and countless stories in its illustrious trail.
But more than anyone else, the pilots who have flown these Soviet-era machines over the decades will bid this workhorse of the Indian Air Force (IAF) a nostalgic farewell.
Veteran pilot and former IAF chief, Air Chief Marshal A Y Tipnis (retd) says the MiG-21 “taught us how to be innovative and produce results”.
In a recorded video podcast shared by the IAF on X a day ahead of the high-profile decommissioning ceremony in Chandigarh, he recalled some of the challenges that he and other pilots who flew the MiG-21 aircraft faced when it was inducted.
Mr. Tipnis began as a fighter pilot in 1960, and, early on he became part of MiG-21 squadrons. In July 1977, he took over as the Commanding Officer of No. 23 Squadron equipped with MiG-21 Bis aircraft, according to the IAF website.
“When the MiG-21 came to us, the first type that came to us was the Type-74; there were no trainers at that time. The first solo was on MiG-21 itself. Difficulty was that not only was there no trainer, no simulator, but also in the entire cockpit, nothing was written in English, it was all in Russian,” he recalls with a whiff of nostalgia.
The veteran air warrior said the speed measurement unit for them also suddenly changed from “knots to km/hr” and it too was a challenge as pilots were “used to knots”.
“So, in the first solo, you are mostly lost, until you came back, and didn’t know how to manage it,” he said.
The former top IAF officer, who served as the Chief of the Air Staff from December 1998 to December 2001, also shared that “in MiG-21, we were all flying in spacesuits, believe it or not”.
Astronaut Yuri Gagarin, when he went up in space, had the same pressure suit and pressure helmet for the first solo, he said, recalling, “We could hardly move our neck from one side to another.”
According to the tentative programme for the decommissioning event, Mr. Tipnis is among the six former IAF chiefs, others being S. Krishnaswamy, S. P. Tyagi, P. V. Naik, B. S. Dhanoa and R. K. S. Bhadauria, who will also attend Friday’s ceremony in Chandigarh, where the iconic aircraft was first inducted over six decades ago.
Having been part of the major share of the aircraft in IAF’s inventory for a long time, several of these Russian-origin fighter jets have been involved in crashes and resulting loss of lives in the past, prompting some to describe these legacy platforms as ‘flying coffins’.
