A few days after Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations released a highly jingoistic song to mark the anniversary of Operation Swift Retort in 2019, which showed Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman who was captured then, Pakistan Air Force pilot Air Commodore Nouman Ali Khan, who shot down India's MiG-21 Bison with a F-16 fighter jet, claimed that Pakistan's J-10C fighter jets are superior to India's Rafale fighters.
READ MORE: Pakistan's new war cry to its 'enemies' a warning to India?
Speaking to a Pakistani news channel, Air Commodore Khan, when asked about India's acquisition of Rafale jets, pointed out that while India has been inducting the fighter jets and making them operational, in response to this, Pakistan acquired and inducted a “superior platform” J-10C. “We not only inducted them, we made them operational,” he told the new channel.
The Rafale 4.5 generation combat jets are twin-engine, delta wing, multirole fighters with a maximum speed of Mach 1.8 and a combat radius of over 1000 km while the twin-engine, delta wing, multirole fighter Chengdu J-10C, with a maximum speed of Mach 1.8 and a combat radius of over 1000 km, too is considered a 4.5-generation aircraft.
There has been a record induction in Pakistan Air Force (IAF) in the past three years, he said and added that this has been done not just in fighter jets domain, but in unmanned areal systems domain as well.
He claimed that the training standards of PAF are world-class and said the incident of 2019, which according to him was a failure for India, shows that “the more rigorous is your training, the less you will be bleeding in wars.”
Air Commodore Khan said Pakistan's air defence network is “very very sophisticated,” adding, “it was sophisticated in 2019, it is more sophisticated now.” According to him, Pakistan behaved like a “responsible state” while shooting down of two Indian jets in February 2019, by keeping the damage to the minimum.
