On Thursday at the Hindon air base in Ghaziabad, Air Chief Marshal AP Singh, the Indian Air Force (IAF) chief, rode to the parade marking the force's 94th anniversary in a car from the 1960s, while three helicopters flew overhead and fighter jets stood on the tarmac nearby.
A year earlier at Hindon, Singh rode in a cream, left-hand-drive Ford with "IAF 1" on its number plate. The car is housed at the Air Force Museum at Palam in New Delhi and is taken out on special occasions.
The car is a 1967 Ford Saloon, inducted into the IAF on July 30, 1969. The car had the distinction of carrying Air Chief Marshal PC Lal in 1969 and went on to ferry all the IAF chiefs who succeeded him until 1992.
A big American saloon
The vintage IAF car is a Saloon, manufactured by Ford in the United States as a 1967 model. It’s an eight-cylinder engine (V-8), producing 315 brake horsepower at 4,600 rpm.
Photographs of the car at the IAF museum show a grille badge, a round medallion on the rear roof pillar and a four-door body with a central door pillar, all of which appear to match Ford's 1967 LTD sedan. Unlike cars in India, which are right-hand drives, the Ford's steering wheel is on the left, as per the layout of cars built for American roads.
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{{/usCountry}}Part of the Galaxie family
The LTD began as one of Ford's Galaxies, the company's big family cars of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.
In December 1964, the British magazine Motor Sport said a “500 LTD” was among the Galaxies that Ford was selling in 1965. PTI reported that the IAF's car was a luxury version of the Galaxie series.
The name ‘Galaxie’ was first used 1959, for the top of its range of large cars, which Ford kept until 1974, according to The Henry Ford, a museum and archive in Dearborn, Michigan. The name was a nod to the space race between the US and the Soviet Union.
In the mid-1960s, Ford sold these cars on the promise of comfort and quiet. Its 1965 advertising promised a “Solid, Silent '65 Ford”, an archive advertisement displayed at the Duke University said.
The advertisement said tests supervised by the US Auto Club had found three 1965 Galaxies, one of them an LTD, quieter inside than two Rolls-Royce Silver Clouds by as much as 5.5 decibels, Motor Sport reported at the time. It added that Ford was not claiming its car was a Rolls-Royce, which cost nearly $17,000.
The Galaxie also had a racing record. In 1963, a Galaxie driven by Tiny Lund won the Daytona 500, a 500-mile stock-car race in Florida, giving Ford its first win in the famed event, with Fords taking the first five places, the automaker has said.
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Twenty-three years with the chiefs
Lal had become IAF chief only weeks before the car joined the force. A Press Information Bureau (PIB) release dated July 17, 1969, recorded that he had taken over from Air Chief Marshal Arjan Singh, who had led the IAF through the 1965 war with Pakistan, and retired on July 15.
Lal went on to command the IAF in the 1971 war with Pakistan. Among the chiefs who used the car after him were Air Chief Marshal Dilbagh Singh, chief from September 1981 to September 1984, whose tenure saw the IAF induct the MiG-25 and MiG-23 and select the Mirage 2000, and Air Chief Marshal NC Suri.
Suri presented the Ford to the Air Force Museum on June 10, 1993. At the Air Force Day in 2025, the car shared the programme at Hindon with the IA’s Heritage Flight, whose vintage Tiger Moth, HT-2 and Harvard aircraft flew an aerial display.