On the morning of May 10, 2025, the Indian Air Force Air Marshal commanding the critical South West Air Command (SWAC) faced a dilemma.
“There was a time when I had to lie to my Chief for this mission,” said Air Marshal Kapoor on NDTV’s podcast, #CtrlAltDefence.
I won’t say I lied to him – I didn’t tell him the truth. “I had to, kind of, not tell him the truth. And this is knowing fully well that he was seeing the same picture that I was seeing in my Ops room. He was seeing the same picture sitting at Air Headquarters Ops Centre. He asked me, ‘Position of those aircraft? So I lied to him inasmuch as time was concerned. The pilots in the jets had spent their entire careers waiting for this moment – years of drills would finally mean something. Weapons loaded. Aircraft fuelled to the last litre. Tension hung over the tarmac. Canopies down. Systems live. Singh. I knew they were not there [yet]. But I had to let them go. Those pilots had been waiting with those weapons suspended for such a long time. It would have been criminal for me not to have let them go.
Because a mistake now would not just be a mistake – it would be a name on a wall, every checklist run once, then run again,. I knew for a fact that they were not going to get airborne for the next 15 minutes.
I said, ‘Sir, getting airborne now. In the cockpits, low voices moved back and forth between pilots and weapons systems operators – clipped, practiced, betraying nothing, though every man’s pulse said otherwise. “Where are they now?” asked the IAF Chief, Air Chief Marshal A.P. “I said, ‘Half an hour from weapon launch. “Much later, the Honourable Raksha Mantri [Defence Minister Rajnath Singh] visited us, and we were sitting and having lunch together, and the Chief was at the same table also, and that is when I told him – in front of the Honourable Raksha Mantri – I said, ‘Sir, I lied to you.'”
