3 more Rafale jets land in India from France

It is expected that the full deliveries of 36 Rafale aircraft will be completed well before April 2022 as announced by Union defence minister Rajnath Singh in Parliament.

Published on: May 27, 2021, 23:06:29 IST

By Shishir Gupta, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

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Another batch of three Rafale fighter jets landed at the Ambala airbase on Thursday, taking the total number of Rafales in the Indian Air Force (IAF) inventory to 23.

India ordered 36 warplanes from France in 2016. (File photo)

According to people aware of the development in Dassault, four aircraft were supposed to take off from Merignac-Bordeaux airbase in France on May 20, but only three could because of the unavailability of more mid-air refuellers in the UAE.

Although four Rafale Omni role fighters were supposed to leave on May 20, the flights were rescheduled due to maintenance issues with the mid air refuellers. The fighters could only take off today due to long weekend holidays in France, the people cited above said.

The IAF is all set to resurrect the 101 “Falcons of Chamb” squadron at Hashimara in West Bengal. It is expected that the full deliveries of 36 Rafale aircraft will be completed well before April 2022 as announced by Union defence minister Rajnath Singh in Parliament.

With India likely to buy more front-line fighters to complete the stalled requirement of 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA), the French have not only offered hot engine technology to India but are also willing to jointly develop extended range and capability Hammer air-to-ground missile under the Atmanirbhar Bharat route. French engine manufacturer Safran has already conveyed the offer for jointly developing aircraft engines upto 100 Kilo Newton thrust as well as share the hot engine technology which Indian allies in the west are reluctant to share.

France has also offered to share and jointly develop technology for longer range and heavier Highly Agile and Manoeuvrable Munition Extended Range (Hammer) missile which is currently part of the weapons package on the Indian Rafale. With a range of over 70 kilometres, the Hammer weapon can be guided on to the target using GPS, Inertial Navigation and Infra-red seeker with the capability to adjust to target location mid-air using maps for course correction. The latest version of this weapon has a 1,000 kilogram bomb and with laser guidance technology.

India ordered 36 warplanes from France (equivalent of two squadrons) in 2016 for ₹59,000 crore under a government-to-government deal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More