Hawker Hunter [BA317]

Details

Ladakh ::

Published: Monday, 17 November 2008 18:20

Leh Airfield

Leh Air Force Station has a Hawker Hunter [BA317]on display. Phil Hawks has written in detail about the Leh airfield on his page here. He noticed the Hunter first in 1987 , at which point of time it was in Camo scheme. In the mid nineties, when Phil visited the town again, the Hunter was now in a metal finish and moved to the center of the Air Force Station facilities, the serial number was now missing.

That was not the last avatar of the Hunter. Arun Sharma has seen this Hunter in 2003, the aircraft is now in the all too familiar Grey paint and is displayed on poles outside the airfield. The aircraft has a metal plate bolted over where its gunpack and shell collectors ("Sabrinas") would have been.

The Hawker Hunter was most probably an ex-No.20 Squadron aircraft, which operated from Leh in the late eighties/early nineties.

One aircraft relic in Leh falls just outside the perimeter. It is the tail fin of An-12 that crashed on approach in 1977, killing over 70 of its occupants. The fin was preserved insitu in a makeshift memorial to those who lost thier lives in the accident.