IAF hones combat skills during Indo-French exercise
Two French Mirage-2000 fighters "lock-on" their advanced multi-mode radars at two Indian Mirage-2000s from 30 km away. A split second later, the French pilots launch their lethal Beyond Visual Range (BVR) missiles and "kill" one of them.
The other Indian pilot, however, manages to dodge the incoming missiles with frantic counter-measures. He then engages the French fighters in close-in combat and shoots them down with "Mantra Magic-II" heat-seeking missiles. But no, there are no aircraft which come crashing down. Nor do the pilots bail out. It’s all part of the mock aerial battles at the joint Indo-French exercise "Garuda" in Gwalior.
"The French pilots are just like us...It’s only that they have better radars, with greater search distances, and are more experienced in BVR combat...They fire missiles much before they visually see an enemy," says an IAF pilot.
"We are inducting active BVRs in our force only now while the French pilots are relatively poor in close combat or dog-fighting skills," he adds. The French pilots seem to agree. "While the IAF pilots are better trained for visual pick-up, we are trained more for BVR combat. We are learning important lessons from each other," says Franck ‘Terra’ Moly of the French Air Force.
The first-ever air combat exercise with a foreign air force is certainly teaching the IAF a thing or two about achieving air-superiority. One lesson is the increasing importance of BVR combat as opposed to WVR (within visual range) combat in modern warfare.
Gwalior, February 12, 2003, Rajat Pandit (TOI)
