Military of Tajikistan - Air Force

Air Force

Because of the civil war, air force development was slow. The first equipment to arrive was 10 MI-8MTBs and 5 MI-24 in 1993 based at Dushanbe. The first transport aircraft were AN-24s(?) and AN-26s(?) were supplied in 1996. A plan from the 1990s to acquire SU-25s from Belarus to form an attack squadron did not occur. The Tajik Air Force remains small as Dushanbe doesn't expect an attack on the nation from the air and that Russian Air Force units at Gissar in Tajikistan and other such Russian contingents in Kazakhstan would deter any such assault. The country is also patrolled by Russian aircraft as part of the Joint CIS Air Defense System. However, Moscow did help bolster the Tajik's helicopter contingents in 2006-07 by giving them six Mil Mi-8 and Mil Mi-24 Hind attack helicopters. It also provided four L-39 Albatros.

An accident occurred on 6 October 2010 when a Mi-8, military helicopter from the Tajik National Guard crashed in the Rasht Valley close to Ezgand and Tavildara. The helicopter got caught in some power lines and crashed without survivors while attempting to land. The helicopter caught fire and crashed without survivors. This is the deadliest accident in Tajik aviation since 1997.

Read more about this topic:  Military Of Tajikistan

Famous quotes containing the words air and/or force:

    If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that—but that isn’t simple.
    Louis B. Lundborg (1906–1981)

    We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.
    William Howard Taft (1857–1930)