In 2017, During a Military Exercise, Indian MiG-29K Fulcrum Fighters Flew over the USS Nimitz

Dario Leone

Security, Asia

But why?

Malabar 2017 is a tri-lateral, two-phase exercise hosted by the Indian Navy and held in Chennai and the waters of the Bay of Bengal.

Taken on Jul. 16, 2017 the interesting photos in this post feature Indian Navy MiG-29K Fulcrum fighter jets flying over the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68) in the Bay of Bengal during Exercise Malabar 2017.

The Mikoyan MiG-29K (NATO reporting name: Fulcrum-D) is a Russian all-weather carrier-based multirole fighter developed by the Mikoyan design bureau and described as a 4++ generation aircraft by its manufacturer.

The MiG-29K was developed in the late 1980s from MiG-29M but since the Russian Navy preferred the Su-27K (later re-designated Su-33), the aircraft was not ordered into production and only two prototypes were originally built in the early 1990s. However the Mikoyan Design Bureau did not stop its work on the MiG-29K aircraft despite the lack of financing since 1992. The program got a boost in the late 1990s to meet an Indian requirement for a ship-borne fighter following the purchase of a former Soviet aircraft carrier (in the form of the INS Vikramaditya which was originally built as Baku and later renamed Admiral Gorshkov), and the MiG-29K was first received by the Indian Navy in 2009.