Former IAF Group Captain Abhinandan Varthaman joins Fly91 as pilot: A look at his education and training

"We do not rise to the level of our expectations," the old military aphorism goes, "we fall to the level of our training." Group Captain Abhinandan Varthaman, one of the most photographed officers in the Indian Air Force (IAF), has spent 22 years proving the second half of that sentence, even as the country mythologised him for a single evening in February 2019.Varthaman has taken premature retirement from the IAF and joined Goa based regional carrier Fly91 as a commercial pilot. He left the force on March 31 and is reported to have joined the airline in August, where he is currently undergoing type training on the ATR 72-600 turboprop before he can fly commercial routes such as Goa-Hyderabad. Fly91 has confirmed his association with the airline but declined to share further details, saying information about individual employees is a private matter. Varthaman himself, true to form, has said nothing.The moustache, the "Sir, I am fine" answer to his interrogators, the F-16 he brought down before ejecting into hostile territory: all of it made for gripping television. What made for less compelling television, and therefore received far less attention, was the seventeen years of unglamorous preparation that came before it.A cantonment childhoodVarthaman was born on June 21, 1983 in Chennai to a Tamil Jain family whose roots trace back to Thirupanamoor, a village near Kanchipuram. His father, Simhakutty Varthaman, retired from the IAF as an Air Marshal, and his mother is a doctor. He grew up, in other words, inside the institution he would eventually come to represent. There was no epiphany, no sudden calling. There was simply a household where service was the family trade.The Sainik School yearsVarthaman was educated at Sainik School, a residential institution built specifically to feed India's National Defence Academy (NDA). Sainik Schools do not chase academic glamour. Their currency is discipline, physical endurance and an early, almost monastic exposure to hierarchy. Boys wake before dawn, drill, study, and are quietly sorted for a life that rewards obedience before it rewards individuality.Khadakwasla and the combat streamFrom Sainik School, Varthaman moved to the NDA in Khadakwasla, the tri-service academy that has fed the officer corps of the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force since 1954. He graduated into the combat, or fighter, stream of the IAF and was commissioned as a Flying Officer on 19 June 2004. What followed was years of technical training at IAF centres in Bathinda and Halwara, a apprenticeship on the Su-30 MKI before he was moved to the MiG-21 Bison squadron that would define his career. He was promoted Flight Lieutenant in 2006, Squadron Leader in 2010 and Wing Commander in 2017.The ninety seconds India remembersOn February 27, 2019, a day after the IAF struck a Jaish-e-Mohammed camp at Balakot, Varthaman was scrambled to intercept Pakistani fighters approaching the Line of Control. He shot down an F-16 before his MiG-21 Bison was struck by a missile, forcing him to eject into Pakistani territory. He was held for nearly 60 hours before being released on March 1, 2019. For his conduct that day, the government conferred on him the Vir Chakra, India's third highest wartime gallantry decoration, its citation praising his aggression despite what it called the enemy's immense numerical and technological superiority. He was promoted to Group Captain in December 2021.A new runwayVarthaman's move to Fly91 closes one chapter and opens a rather more prosaic one. It keeps him where his entire education pointed him from the age of eleven: in a cockpit. For a man built, quite literally, by an institution designed to manufacture composure under pressure, that continuity matters more than the uniform he is no longer wearing.Get the latest Education News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.