There is a particular kind of silence that falls over twenty thousand people when a fighter jet stops flying.
I was standing on the apron at Yelahanka Air Force Station when Sergey Bogdan pulled the Su-57 into a stall. The jet hung there with its nose up, no lift, no forward speed, nothing holding it in the air at all, and then it started tumbling sideways like a leaf coming off a tree. Nobody around me said anything. Then the engines caught, the nose dropped, and it was a fighter again.
I had watched the “falling leaf” on YouTube maybe a dozen times before that week. It is not the same in person.
That is the moment I keep coming back to, but it is not really why Aero India 2025 mattered. What mattered was sitting quietly on static display a few hundred metres away: an American F-35 Lightning II. Two fifth-generation stealth fighters, from two governments that spend most of their budgets planning around each other, parked on the same flight line in Bengaluru in February.
Getting there is the first test
Aero India ran from 10 to 14 February 2025, organised by India’s Ministry of Defence under the theme “The Runway to a Billion Opportunities.” It is Asia’s largest airshow and the marketing does not undersell it.
Yelahanka sits about an hour from Kempe Gowda International Airport, at least according to the map. Bengaluru traffic has its own opinion. It was bad enough that the German Air Force pilot team missed the opening ceremony entirely, which I think says more about the city’s roads than any statistic I could put here. If a NATO air force cannot beat the morning rush, the rest of us were never going to.
The entrance was its own small world. Layered security checks, families with kids up on shoulders, aviation obsessives carrying lenses the length of my forearm, defence executives in lanyards trying to look unimpressed by all of it. Loud, slow moving, and a lot of fun.
Two answers to the same question
Having the F-35 and the Su-57 within walking distance of each other gives you a rare chance to look at the same problem, which is roughly “how do you own the sky in 2025,” and see two very different answers to it.
The F-35 is built around information. Lockheed Martin’s jet is a multi-role platform designed for sensor fusion, networked warfare and a very small radar cross-section. The angular, faceted shape is not styling, it is geometry doing a job. What draws people in on static display is not really the airframe anyway, it is the story attached to it: the helmet-mounted display, the integrated avionics, the idea that the pilot effectively sees through the aircraft. The argument underneath is that whoever understands the battlespace first wins it.
Sukhoi went the other direction. The Su-57 has a bigger frame, twin engines and an aerodynamic package built for supermaneuverability and raw agility. It is designed to win the fight it is already in, close and fast and messy, and to hunt stealth rather than only hide from it.
You feel the difference physically at an airshow. The F-35 sits still and lets you read the spec sheet. The Su-57 goes up and shows you.
I do not think either one is obviously better. They are answers to different questions, written by different doctrines and paid for by different assumptions about what the next war looks like. Standing between them felt less like watching a competition and less like a debate than like looking at a fork in the road that military aviation took about fifteen years ago.
The part nobody said out loud
The technical comparison was interesting. The politics were louder.
The United States and Russia do not put their flagship fighters on the same flight line. It essentially does not happen. That it happened at all was the real headline, and it turned Aero India into something closer to a diplomatic venue than a trade show.
It happened in India for a reason. The Indian Air Force flies a mixed fleet, with Russian airframes, French airframes, American transports and a growing number of indigenous designs. Hosting both jets at the same event, with both delegations present, was a fairly precise statement about how India intends to position itself, which is to buy from everyone and owe nothing to anyone.
Whether that balance holds is a question for someone else’s article. But you could see the strategy sitting on the tarmac.
The quieter story
HAL had the Dhruv on display, the indigenous multi-role helicopter used for transport, search and rescue, and combat support. It looks unglamorous parked near a Felon, but it is the kind of platform that tells you whether a country can actually build things rather than just buy them well.
DRDO’s Akash Prime was the standout for me. It is an upgraded version of the Akash medium-range surface-to-air missile system, with better accuracy, a reach of up to 45 kilometres and improved performance against fast-moving targets like fighters, drones and cruise missiles. The detail worth noticing is the indigenous RF seeker, because the seeker is the hard part. The system is mobile and quick to deploy, meant for protecting strategic assets and cities.
The Swathi Weapon Locating Radar drew the most serious-looking foreign delegates I saw all week. It is a mobile phased-array system that picks up incoming artillery, mortar and rocket fire and works out firing coordinates for counter-battery response, out to around 50 kilometres. Rugged, usable across different terrain, and exactly the sort of unglamorous capability that quietly decides how a real conflict goes.
The Rafale, and the gap it fills
Somewhere between the legacy fleet and the fifth-generation future sits the IAF’s Rafale.
Dassault’s 4.5-generation multi-role fighter was both on static display and in the air, and it holds up well. AESA radar, a deep weapons catalogue including the Meteor beyond-visual-range missile and the SCALP cruise missile, and real versatility across air superiority, ground attack and reconnaissance.
I took a selfie with it. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The Rafale is the bridge. It is the aircraft doing the actual work while the next generation gets argued over, negotiated and slowly built.
Everything else
Boeing and Airbus brought hardware. The American C-130 Hercules sat with the transports looking like the dependable friend at a party full of celebrities. The IAF’s Surya Kiran team flew tight, disciplined formations on their Hawks, and the visiting international aerobatic teams kept the sky busy between the headline slots.
Was it worth it
Yes, with a few complaints.
The heat is real. The crowds are real. Mobile connectivity gave up completely once a few hundred thousand people tried to upload the same photo at the same moment. Crowd management and basic amenities are where Aero India still lags behind Oshkosh or Singapore, and that is a logistics problem rather than a technology one, which makes it fixable.
The ambition is not in question though. In a single afternoon I watched a Russian test pilot make a stealth fighter tumble on purpose, walked past an American jet built on the opposite philosophy, and then looked at radar and missile systems designed and built a few hundred kilometres from where I was standing.
That combination does not exist anywhere else. Aero India 2025 was a decent picture of where military aviation is heading, and a clearer one of where India intends to stand while it gets there.
I would go again. I would also leave for the venue three hours early.
All photographs by the author.
