NEW DELHI: The big bird has taken to the skies. In its first operational deployment since it landed in India on June 18, the IAF's gigantic C-17 Globemaster-III strategic airlift aircraft transported an Army infantry battalion to the country's last military outpost in the Andman and Nicobar Islands on Sunday.
"Operating from the Hindon airbase, on the outskirts of New Delhi, the C-17 inducted the rotational infantry battalion at Port Blair,'' said an officer.
The C-17s, IAF has contracted 10 of them for $4.1 billion in mid-2011 under the largest defence deal inked with the US till now, which will allow India to transport heavy armoured vehicles, howitzers and combat troops to distant battlefronts or hotspots at the double.
After the first C-17, the Hindon airbase is slated to get two more this month. All the ten will be in place by June 2015. Capable as they are of landing on forward makeshift runways with short turnaround times, the rugged C-17s are central to the swift power-projection capabilities being slowly acquired by India to counter China's massive build-up of military infrastructure along the Line of Actual Control, which includes at least five fully-operational airbases, an extensive rail network and over 58,000-km of roads in the Tibet Autonomous Region.
These giant four-engine airlifters also dovetail neatly into the Army's endeavour to raise a new mountain strike corps (around 40,000 soldiers), apart from two "independent" infantry brigades and two "independent" armoured brigades, to plug operational gaps as well as to acquire "some ground offensive capabilities" against China. With a cargo weight of 70 tonnes, the C-17s can take off, fly a distance of 4,200 km and land in a runway of just about 3,500 feet in length.
With half the load, they can go more than double the distance. The C-17s will join the six C-130J 'Super Hercules' aircraft, much smaller than the former but equally adept at landing at austere airstrips, already based at Hindon for the last couple of years. India is currently negotiating to acquire six more C-130s from the US. Interestingly, the six new C-130J 'Super Hercules', which will also be customised for "special and covert operations" like the first six, will be based at Panagarh in West Bengal to take care of the eastern sector with China. The Army's new mountain strike corps will also have its headquarters in Panagarh.
