IAF Chief Arrives In A 58 Year-Old V8 Engined Ford Galaxie [Video]

The jets took the sky as they always do on Air Force Day. What no one quite expected was the sight that rolled up to the saluting base. Air Chief Marshal Amar Preet Singh arrived at Hindon in a vintage 1967 Ford saloon with a V8 under the bonnet, a left-hand-drive staff car wearing the simple registration IAF 1.

The car is not a prop pulled from a film set. It is an old service hand that once ferried Air Chiefs through the late sixties, seventies and eighties, inducted into the fleet on 30 July 1969 and used until the early nineties before being retired to the Palam Air Force Museum. On big days like this, it comes out for one more slow lap of duty.

The choice was not random nostalgia. A V8 Ford from the sixties brings to the parade a particular idea of authority. The long wheelbase gives it the easy ride that ceremonial work demands.

The period cabin has bench seats, an AM radio and powered rear windows that would have felt space age to visitors at Air Headquarters in 1969. The car’s shape carries the straight lines and stacked lamps that marked out American saloons of the era.

Stand close and you can almost hear the steady burble at idle, the kind of low note that tells you torque, not revs, will do the job. The car on duty this year was identified as a Ford Galaxie V8, which fits the silhouette that sits at Palam. Either way, a sixties Ford saloon in service colours is emblematic of a time when the services bought durability and presence in equal measure.

That museum board at Palam explains why the Ford matters to the service. It started as the personal staff car of Air Chief Marshal P. C. Lal and then served successive chiefs until about 1992.

When the era of such imports drew to a close, the car stayed on as an exhibit and the IAF looked to more modern transport for daily work. Seeing Air Chief Marshal A. P. Singh step out of the same machine on the 93rd Air Force Day stitched the present to a very specific past. It was a nod to continuity more than a flourish.

To understand why this resonated, it helps to picture the roads the Ford once shared. India of the late fifties and sixties was still assembling American saloons from kits.

Premier Automobiles in Bombay put together Dodge Kingsways and Plymouth Savoys for a few years, cars with broad shoulders and chrome that must have looked mythical parked outside a district collectorate. They sat at the top of the pile, priced and specced for offices and officers.

Below them, the Hindustan Ambassador was settling in for a very long run, the Mark II arriving in the mid-sixties with its new grille and a promise of more of the same.

In the south, the Standard Herald came out of Madras with neat Italian lines courtesy of Giovanni Michelotti - small engine or not, a surprisingly modern shape for the time. These are the shapes a young officer would have seen out of the window of that Ford.

Every city had its own pecking order. The Ambassador was the workhorse that did everything from government duty to wedding runs. The Standard Herald was the stylish outlier, especially in two-door form before the market nudged it into four.

And then there were the imports that turned up like film stars on Sundays. A Chevrolet Impala in the late sixties could light up a whole avenue with just its tail fins and the sweep of its roof. That is the league the Ford at Hindon came from. It did not need to be loud to be noticed. It had width, and it had that quiet rumble at low speed that passers-by felt in their ribcage.

There is also a reason a left-hand-drive car made sense even when the wheels on our roads sat on the other side. Much of that era’s top-tier machinery came with steering on the left by default and the services prized reliability over perfect format. The Ford ran for decades because it could be kept running.

It had the big-block robustness of its time, and the support structure of a disciplined motor transport unit. On ceremonial mornings it would have been checked, fuelled, polished and parked by the minute. That is what made it special for duty years later. It was a working veteran, not an oddity dusted off from storage.

If you are old enough, the Hindon moment probably unlocked a few private reels. A relative’s Ambassador with a tinny dashboard radio that needed a thump. A Herald seen once on holiday, bonnet tipped forward, number plate painted by hand.

A brief glimpse of a big American saloon passing the club gates on a Sunday, the driver in a white shirt and peak cap. Cars then were fewer, slower and more individual. They were also easier to remember. When one left a mark, it stayed.

That is why the Ford’s lap at Hindon worked. It was not there to outshine the Tejas flypast or the marching columns. It did something smaller and more human. It brought a piece of the service’s roadgoing memory into a day otherwise defined by aircraft.

The Chief’s choice underlined the point that institutions keep stories alive by using them, not by locking them away. A slow approach in a car that has carried a generation of chiefs says more about continuity than any speech could.

And if the sight of a sixties Ford set you off on a rabbit hole, there is plenty to find. At Palam, the museum display shows the very car that did the rounds for over two decades. Old threads from enthusiasts recall Kingsways and Savoys being assembled in Bombay.

Histories of the Herald in Madras read like dispatches from another industry. Look up the Ambassador Mark II and you will see a shape that lasted so long it became a shorthand for officialdom itself. Put that collage together and the Ford at Hindon makes perfect sense. For one morning, the staff car was a time machine.