{"id":295395,"date":"2019-10-09T10:20:19","date_gmt":"2019-10-09T04:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/?p=295395"},"modified":"2019-10-09T10:28:02","modified_gmt":"2019-10-09T04:58:02","slug":"iaf-87th-anniversary-india-gets-first-rafale-celebrates-balakot-strike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/iaf-87th-anniversary-india-gets-first-rafale-celebrates-balakot-strike\/","title":{"rendered":"IAF 87th anniversary: India gets first Rafale, celebrates Balakot strike"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As the Indian Air Force (IAF) celebrated its 87th anniversary on Tuesday, a clear theme was the operations of February 26, when Indian fighter aircraft attacked the Balakot terrorist training camp in Pakistan and skirmished with counter-attacking Pakistan Air Force (PAF) fighters the next morning. Drawing thunderous applause from spectators at Hindan Air Base outside Delhi was the \u201cavenger formation\u201d in the fly-past, a three-aircraft formation led by Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman in his MiG-21 Bison fighter, flanked by two Mirage 2000 fighters flown by pilots who had bombed Balakot. <\/p>\n<p>Varthaman was shot down and captured by the Pakistani military in that skirmish, but only after shooting down a PAF F-16 fighter, as claimed by the IAF.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As the Indian Air Force (IAF) celebrated its 87th anniversary on Tuesday, a clear theme was the operations of February 26, when Indian fighter aircraft attacked the Balakot terrorist training camp in Pakistan and skirmished with counter-attacking Pakistan Air Force (PAF) fighters the next morning. Drawing thunderous applause from spectators at Hindan Air Base outside Delhi was the \u201cavenger formation\u201d in the fly-past, a three-aircraft formation led by Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman in his MiG-21 Bison fighter, flanked by two Mirage 2000 fighters flown by pilots who had bombed Balakot. Varthaman was shot down and captured by the Pakistani military [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,167,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-standard-newspapers","category-civil-aviation-business-standard-newspapers","category-newspapers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}