Bengaluru, May 24 -- In a setting that feels straight out of a defence aviation thriller, India has quietly trained and graduated its next generation of elite test pilots and flight test engineers - the people who will decide how tomorrow's fighter jets, helicopters and aerospace systems actually perform in real skies.
At Bengaluru's Air Force Test Pilots School, 17 officers - drawn from the Indian Air Force, Indian Army and Indian Navy - completed an intense 48-week course that pushes them into one of the most demanding roles in military aviation: testing aircraft that are still being designed, refined, or pushed to their absolute limits.
These are not combat pilots in the usual sense. They are the first humans to fly experimental machin...