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The Indian Air Force announced on 22 August 2026 that it had concluded participation in two international flight engagements - Exercise Pitch Black 2026 in Australia and Exercise Udara Shakti 2026 in Malaysia - in a single back-to-back deployment.
At Pitch Black 2026, hosted by the Royal Australian Air Force, the IAF deployed its frontline Rafale aircraft and flew Large Force Employment (LFE) missions alongside air forces from over 20 participating nations.
The contingent then deployed directly to Subang, Malaysia, for Exercise Udara Shakti 2026, flying combat sorties with and against the Royal Malaysian Air Force's Su-30MKM and F/A-18 Hornet aircraft.
Both engagements included subject matter expert exchanges (SMEE), maintenance practices and mission planning exchanges, aimed at interoperability and at strengthening defence partnerships across the Indo-Pacific.
| Aspect | Exercise Pitch Black | Exercise Udara Shakti |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Multinational air combat exercise | Bilateral air exercise |
| Host / partner | Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), Australia | Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF), Malaysia |
| Venue of the 2026 edition | RAAF Bases Darwin and Tindal (Northern Territory) and Amberley (Queensland) | Subang Air Base, Malaysia |
| Frequency and history | Biennial; held from Darwin since 1983 | First edition 2022; second edition at Kuantan in 2024 |
| IAF asset in 2026 | Rafale (first Pitch Black appearance) | Rafale (first Udara Shakti appearance) |
| Focus per the release | Large Force Employment missions in a high-threat, multi-domain environment; interoperability among coalition partners | High-intensity combat sorties and joint tactical manoeuvres; refining air combat tactics and subject matter expert exchanges |
Air arm of the Indian Armed Forces under the Ministry of Defence; deployed the Rafale to Pitch Black 2026 and Udara Shakti 2026 in a single continuous deployment.
Host of Exercise Pitch Black, Australia's premier air combat exercise, run from bases in the Northern Territory and Queensland.
Partner air force in Exercise Udara Shakti; flies the Su-30MKM and the F/A-18 Hornet, both of which flew with and against the IAF at Subang.
French twin-engine, delta-wing, 4.5-generation multirole fighter built by Dassault Aviation. India signed a contract for 36 aircraft on 23 September 2016, valued at about EUR 7.87 billion, through the inter-governmental agreement route; the first five arrived in India on 29 July 2020 and were inducted into No. 17 Squadron 'Golden Arrows' at Ambala, with the second Rafale squadron, No. 101, based at Hasimara.
A Large Force Employment mission puts many aircraft of different types and roles - fighters, tankers, airborne early warning, electronic warfare - into the air at once as a single coordinated package operating against defended, contested airspace. It is the closest peacetime approximation of a real air campaign, and it is why exercises such as Pitch Black are valued far above routine bilateral sorties. Interoperability is the ability of forces from different countries to operate inside such a package: common mission-planning procedures, compatible communications and datalinks, a shared tactical vocabulary and mutually understood rules of engagement. The PIB release notes that the exchange extended beyond flying to maintenance practices and mission planning - the unglamorous half of interoperability that decides whether two air forces can actually operate side by side.
Simple Analogy: A bilateral sortie is two musicians jamming. An LFE mission is a full orchestra sight-reading a new score together - everyone must follow the same conductor, the same notation and the same timing, or the piece collapses.
The Malaysia leg is a textbook Act East activity - the policy succeeded the Look East Policy launched in 1991 under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and was rebranded Act East in 2014, widening it from trade with ASEAN to strategic and security cooperation.
Australia, India, Japan and the United States all flew at Pitch Black 2026 and are the four Quad members; the exercise is one of the routine settings in which Quad air forces build habits of working together without invoking the grouping's name.
Exercise participation is one of the few peacetime instruments that demonstrates reach rather than merely declaring intent - a fighter detachment that sustains itself across Australia and Malaysia has shown something no memorandum can.
Prelims regularly asks which country an exercise is held with. Pitch Black (Australia) and Udara Shakti (Malaysia) belong in the same list as Garuda (France), Cope India (United States), Desert Flag (United Arab Emirates) and Eastern Bridge (Oman).
GS Paper 2 > International Relations > Bilateral and Regional Groupings; GS Paper 3 > Security
General Awareness > Current Affairs > Defence Exercises
Current Affairs > Military Exercises and Equipment
General Awareness > Defence
Military exercise-and-country pairings appear almost every year in SSC, Railway and defence examinations and recur in UPSC Prelims matching questions.
A mission in which many aircraft of different types and roles operate as one coordinated package against a contested air environment.
The ability of forces from different countries to operate together using compatible procedures, communications and mission planning.
Subject Matter Expert Exchange - structured professional exchanges between specialists of two forces during an exercise.
The Royal Malaysian Air Force's variant of the Sukhoi Su-30 family, closely related to the Indian Air Force's Su-30MKI.