The exercise, which will witness participation by over 100 aircraft, will be held at the Royal Australian Air Force bases at Tindal and Darwin from July 27 to August 17 this year.

NEW DELHI: New Delhi may have rebuffed Australia’s request that it be allowed to take part in the annual trilateral Malabar naval wargames that India holds with the US and Japan, but will be dispatching four Sukhoi-30MKI fighter jets and a C-17 Globemaster-III strategic airlift aircraft to the country to participate in the multilateral “Pitch Black” air combat exercise.

This will be India’s first appearance in the Pitch Black exercise hosted by Australia once every two years, usually including the US, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore and Thailand, among other countries.

The exercise, which will witness participation by over 100 aircraft, will be held at the Royal Australian Air Force bases at Tindal and Darwin from July 27 to August 17 this year. It will be IAF’s third multilateral exercise in the last three years, after the Red Flag exercise in the US in April-May 2016 and the Blue Flag wargames at Israel in November 2017.

“With a range of realistic threats that can be found in modern-day air warfare, Pitch Black is the biggest air combat exercise in the southern hemisphere. Australia had first invited the IAF for the exercise in 2016 but that did not work out. This time, it’s all systems go,” said an official.

India and Australia, with their expanding strategic ties, already hold a joint naval exercise called AUSINDEX, the first edition of which was held off Visakhapatnam in 2015 and the second off Fremantle in 2017.

As earlier reported by TOI, India has for now opposed the inclusion of Australia in the trilateral Malabar exercise. Warships, submarines and aircraft from India, the US and Japan are all set to kick off another edition of the top-notch Malabar exercise off Guam in the Western Pacific from June 6 to

15. China, incidentally, had lodged a strong protest against the Malabar exercise in the Bay of Bengal in 2007 when it had been expanded to include Australia and Singapore as well.