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Journalism of Courage
The Indian Air Force can soon breathe easy on an aircraft it had worked hard to keep off the radar since a small fleet was acquired from Russia in the early 1980s.
Its squadron of five MiG-25 Foxbat spy planes, based in Bareilly, will be retired next year. But the Force will continue to guard the legacy of its quarter century of service — thousands of highly-sensitive black and white photographs of foreign war assets and border territories, taken from each plane’s two high-powered spy cameras.
The IAF’s proposed Aerospace Command, when approved, will take over the Foxbats’ job, using satellites and high-altitude surveillance platforms.
The Foxbat is the only IAF jet that operates in the stratosphere at speed exceeding three Mach, making it the fastest aircraft in the Force. Its mission profile, however, has been scaled down drastically. Operating out of Bakshi-ka-Talab by the 102 Squadron, codenamed Trisonics, the Foxbats are now used for training sorties.
The aircraft threw up a huge advantage for the IAF when it was acquired in the 1980s, as it could not be detected by Pakistani and Chinese ground radars. It flew at heights just below outer space, making it physically invisible to enemy eyes and ears. Now, long-range surveillance radars have compromised the Foxbat’s effectiveness.
Foxbat missions were highly specific, the photographs taken by two left-to-right rotating cameras (600mm and 1,300mm) rapidly recorded assets under the plane’s flight-path.
The aircraft continues to be one of the IAF’s most closely-guarded secrets. MiG-25 pilots are not allowed to discuss the nature of missions they went on in the first decade of service. However, some admit that these included high-speed, high-altitude missions into foreign air space.
The Army also often requested the Foxbats’ services in the 1980s to plug holes in intelligence on Pakistani armoured divisions and strategic reserves closer to the border.
In May 1997, a MiG-25 had famously broken into Pakistani air space. A MiG-25 pilot says the mission would have remained a secret if the pilot had not accelerated to supersonic speed — the sound immediately alerting the ground surveillance staff. But its altitude and speed still allowed the aircraft to evade Pakistan’s F-16s and plunge back into Indian airspace.
Sources said an unspecified number of Foxbats have already been retired and the remaining will be gone next year.
