View from the cockpit: Memories of flying a MiG-21

December 1980. There were seven of us, newly commissioned Pilot Officers (a rank which no longer exists in the Indian Air Force).

- Aneesh Chawla

It was close to the end of our applied course on Iskra TS-I1 jet trainers and we had been summoned to the Chief Instructor's (CI) office. The Fighter Training Wing, located at the Hakimpet Air Force Station in Secunderabad, had been our home for the previous 12 months. None of us knew where and when we had messed up to deserve the call up to the CI's office, a feared location best avoided.

When we came out, half an hour later, none of us could stop smiling. We had been selected to go directly to MiG-21 squadrons instead of the usual route via Hunter aircraft at Operational Conversion Unit, Kalaikunda. The Air Force had decided to experiment with this a year earlier when an initial bunch of pilots had been sent to MiG-21 squadrons. It was a big jump from a slow-moving jet trainer to the high performance supersonic MiG-21. Apparently, we would validate the experiment of bypassing flying in the high subsonic intermediate Hunters allowing the IAF to set up the MiG Operational Flight Training Unit.

Our anticipated annual leave was cut, from four weeks to two, because we were to stay back and do some additional flying to prepare us for the MiG-21. We were young and cocky. And we were soon cut to size by the MiG-21 instructors with whom we flew the extra flights as they gave us no quarter or leeway while flying tail-chase and tactical exercises.

January 1981. After a short leave in Delhi, I was bound for the northeast, trav-elling by train to the Tezpur Air Force Station. Picked up by an old truck from the station and unceremoniously dropped off at the Officers’ Mess where I had been allotted a leaky old “Basha” (a hut) to be shared with my course mate Harp, later Air Marshal Harpal Singh with a lot of suffixes.