In a first, two Mirage 2000 jets land at Saifai

In a first for the Indian Air Force (IAF), the country or any village in India, two Mirage 2000 fighter jets were test landed at and flown back from the Saifai village airstrip on Saturday.

Updated on: May 17, 2015, 00:53:29 IST

Hindustan Times | By Pankaj Jaiswal, Lucknow

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In a first for the Indian Air Force (IAF), the country or any village in India, two Mirage 2000 fighter jets were test landed at and flown back from the Saifai village airstrip on Saturday.

Saifai is the ancestral village of the former Union defence minister and Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav.

The district magistrate of Etawah, Nitin Bansal, confirmed the IAF’s Saturday venture by Central Air Command but said that he was not aware as to which air base the two jets came and went back to. However, the fighter jets were reportedly from the Mirage 2000 squadron based at Gwalior air base.

The Saturday’s exercise came the same week the chief minister had a meeting at his residence with the Central Air Command delegation where he agreed in principle for making of a highway runway of the Air Force on Agra-Lucknow expressway, the first highway runway to come up in the country.

In the meeting, the Air Force also said that it would help Uttar Pradesh in training its State Disaster Response Force and would also help the state whenever needed in any calamity or disaster relief.

The district magistrate (DM) and some officers were present during the event, but the IAF had prohibited any photography or videography of it. Though, they themselves captured the whole exercise on high resolution cameras – both still and video.

Bansal said that IAF did the test as they may use the airstrip for any emergency purposes or exercises.

IAF had deployed a substantial support staff of its personnel at the Saifai airstrip that inspected, studied, prepared the airstrip before the landing and studied it after the take off.

Mirage 2000 is a single-engine fourth generation jet fighter manufactured by Dassault Aviation, France. India is the only country in the subcontinent to have it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pankaj Jaiswal
Pankaj Jaiswal is Bureau Chief, Uttar Pradesh. He covers-analyses politics, and assists Hindustan Times reporters across the state. He has 30 years of experience in print media reporting. Based in Lucknow, he started his journalism career at a national English daily in Kanpur after graduating from Christ Church College. He joined Hindustan Times, Lucknow edition, as part of the launch team in 1997. He’s covered everything from rural distress to science, environment, wildlife, and crime. He has travelled extensively in Uttar Pradesh for rural, development, political, and election reporting. His continued interest in rural issues, rural distress, and development journalism has fetched him a handful of prestigious awards and fellowships. Pankaj is a photojournalist too. He clinched the Statesman Award for Rural Reporting—First Prize in 2009 and Third Prize in 2006—for exposing Bundelkhand’s devastating drought and distress: crop failures, farm suicides, migration, debt, and the injustice of meagre compensation cheques between Rs 10 and Rs 20 to farmers by the government from crop loss. He also has been awarded with Hindustan Times internal 'Journalist of the Month' citation over half a dozen times. His relentless reporting in Hindustan Times pulled the Bundelkhand crisis out of obscurity and forced it into the national spotlight, prompting media and government action on one of India’s most neglected regions. Over a decade, he filed hundreds of hard-hitting stories, travelling repeatedly from Lucknow deep into Bundelkhand. He also received the Special Mention KC Kulish International Award 2009. Pankaj also did long-haul political reporting on the most intense political family feud—’The Yadav Family Feud’—between 2016 and 2022.Read More