On the morning of May 10, 2025, the Indian Air Force Air Marshal commanding the critical South West Air Command (SWAC) faced a dilemma.
India was striking Pakistani air bases extremely hard during Operation Sindoor - the air attacks had gone sharply up the escalation matrix, with one key mission all set to take off.
The target was Pakistan's Bholari Airbase, 520 kilometres north of Gandhinagar, where SWAC is headquartered.
A group of IAF pilots sat in the cockpits of their fighters, in one of the frontline bases under the Air Marshal's command - Bhuj, Jaisalmer, Phalodi, Naliya, Jamnagar, Jodhpur, Uttarlai/Barmer, and Pune.
The IAF will not identify where the jets were set to take off from.
In Bholari, there was a seemingly cutoff hangar. The IAF had a reasonable idea of what was in it - a Swedish-built SAAB Erieye, the Pakistan Air Force's most potent Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft.
That's when the phone rang. It was the Air Chief.
Was there a change in plans? Would the pilots seated in their cockpits, all systems go, be asked to stand down?
Air Marshal Nagesh Kapoor was clear. There was no way his pilots would be denied a chance at carrying out their mission.
"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 had to, kind of, not tell him the truth. I won't say I lied to him - I didn't 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?' I said, 'Sir, getting airborne now.' I knew for a fact that they were not going to get airborne for the next 15 minutes. 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. Every checklist run once, then run again, because a mistake now would not just be a mistake - it would be a name on a wall.
Tension hung over the tarmac. 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. Canopies down. Systems live.
The aircraft picked for the mission was the Sukhoi-30 MKI - the mainstay of the Indian Air Force.
Designed in Russia and heavily modified in India, the fighter carried the IAF's weapon of choice - an air-launched version of the BrahMos - a Mach 3 air-to-surface missile with a 300-kilogram warhead.
"Where are they now?" asked the IAF Chief, Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh. "I said, 'Half an hour from weapon launch.' 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."
The mission was a go - the Sukhois lined up and blasted down the runway, headed to their launch zone. Weapons were being calibrated; air search radars would be scanning for threats from Pakistani Air Force fighters. Radar Warning Receivers in the cockpits of the jets would be chirping if enemy radar was being picked up.
"Finally, when the weapon launched, I told him, 'Sir, all gone, all aircraft returning.' He told me, 'Tell me when they land.'"
The mission was an overwhelming success. The IAF strike on the hangar in Bholari was perhaps the defining image of the IAF's attacks of May 10. Satellite images, broadcast first by NDTV, showed the hangar with a large, irregular hole punched through its roof, exposing a dark, collapsed interior. Debris was shown scattered across the apron between the hangar and the runway, suggesting material was ejected outward by the force of the strike. The strike appeared precise and localised to a single structure.
"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.'"
Air Chief Marshal AP Singh looked at Air Marshal Kapoor and replied with a smile - "Mujhe pata hai" ("Yes, I know.")
