Around 10 top-notch combat pilots of the Navy will leave for
Russia early next week to complete their training on Russian-origin MiG-29K
fighter planes ahead of their deployment on-board the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft
carrier.
The pilots will form the first batch of fully-trained pilots
to operate out of Gorshkov, which will be commissioned as INS Vikramaditya in
Russia on November 16 by Defence Minister A K Antony.
The Indian crew, consisting of around 1,500 personnel, is
already in Russia to take over the 45,000-tonne Kiev class aircraft
carrier from the Russian Navy, which tested the warship extensively at sea,
including with 500 on-board sorties of fighter planes.
India had bought Gorshkov, an unused aircraft carrier, from
Russia in 2004 and sent it to the Sevmash shipyard there for a refit and
refurbishment. After the shipyard haggled for a hike in payments from $974
million for the work being done on the warship, India agreed to pay $2.34
billion as the final payment in 2010.
The warship was to be handed over to India in December 2012,
but got delayed by a year after the Russians identified trouble in the boilers
of the warship during sea trial in mid-2012 and hence postponed the delivery by
a year.
Now the warship is ready for getting operational after a
second round of tests and will reach India by the end of December 2013. India
had also bought 16 MiG-29Ks for operating from Gorshkov along with the warship
for $526 million in 2004. The Navy also ordered for 29 more MiG-29Ks, of which
five have been delivered by Russia so far.
The 10 pilots, who had extensive phase-I training, will
undergo the phase-II and Phase-III final training in Russia when they will
train on a simulator and later progress to flying the plane from the a
shore-based training facility and graduate to flying off the deck of an
aircraft carrier.
The Navy has already raised the MiG-29K squadron for INS
Vikramaditya at Goa, christened the INAS 303 squadron. A shore-based
training facility too has come up at INS Hansa naval air base in Goa, where the
pilots have been training for a couple of years now.
No comments:
Post a Comment