Chief of United States Air Force General David l Goldfein will fly indigenously designed and manufactured Tejas light Combat Aircraft (lCA) on Saturday at the Jodhpur airbase. This will be the first a head of a foreign military will undertake a sortie in Tejas.
General Goldfein, who is on his visit to India, will undertake a sortie in Tejas from Jodhpur air force station on Saturday morning. Goldfein along with General Terrence O’Shaughnessy, Commander of US Pacific Air Force arrived in New Delhi on Thursday to boost military ties between the two nations and already had rounds of discussions with key functionaries of IAF including the Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa.
Incidentally, it is for the first time to two top most military commanders of US have arrived India together, IAF officials said here on Friday.
In November last year, Singapore Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen took a 30-minute sortie in Tejas at Kalaikunda airbase, West Bengal and hailed the aircraft as “excellent and very impressive.”
Tejas is a single seat, single engine multi-role light fighter aircraft. The IAF has formally placed order for 83 Tejas aircraft with Hindustan Aeronautics limited(HAl).
The aircraft is more than 70 per cent indigenous and has the fly by wire, State of the art open architecture computer for avionics and better weapon and combat capability.