New Delhi: The first five Rafales tore into the skies over France with sonic booms on Monday to begin their 7K Kms flight to India, which will include Midair refueling and an overnight a single stop in UAE.

The three singe seat and two twin seat Omni-role fighters, flown by seven IAF pilots lead by Commanding Officer Group Captain Harkirat Singh will arrive in Ambala to launch the 17 ‘Golden Arrow’ squadron on Wednesday. After India’s Ambassador Javed Ashraf flag-off the five Rafales from the Merignac Airbase in Bordeaux, they landed at the AL- Dhafra airbase in UAE on Monday evening after flying for over seven hours, an IAF officer.

The imminent arrival of the five Rafales, out of the 36 contracted from France in the Rs. 59K Crores deal linked in September 2016, comes two decades after IAF first demanded such fighters and an intense BJP-Congress dogfight over corruption allegations in the last two years. The fighters dubbed “Game Changers” by IAF will of course touch down here bang in the middle of the ongoing military confrontation with China.

But top IAF sources played down the ‘Overhype’ stressing that new fighters take time to settle down and be properly integrated into the entire war fighting machinery. No new weapons systems, especially complex ones like fighters, can be deployed just like that. First the fighters have to be extensively flown in Indian conditions to develop tactics and other operational procedures, said source. The new weapon, in effect, takes time to be weaponized.

Moreover, the five Rafales do not constitute even a half squadron as of now. IAF has already deployed an adequate number of Sukhoi- 30 MKIs, MIG- 29s and Mirage- 2000 in forward areas along the LAC with China to take care of any contingency. The effort will be to make the Rafales operational as fast as possible due to the border situation with China. It will probably take atleast two months, he added.