Presidents Fleet Review 2006

After those disturbing images of me and that unfortunate trend of postbox fascination, let us come back to our stamps of planes. This set of four stamps was released by the India post in 2006 on occasion of the Presidents fleet review.

The first Presidents fleet review of the Indian Navy took place on 1953. During that review, the First Indian President Dr Rajendra Prasad inspected four lines and 25 ships. It wasn't a very impressive showing by most standards, In that fleet review, the pride of the fleet was INS Delhi, which when it came into the Indian Navy, was already an 20 year old vessel. But then we had got independence hardly six years back and the fact that 25 ships managed to steer in four lines must have been a neat sight in itself.

The next time we dared to have a fleet review was in 1964. Instead of the President that review was inspected by the defence minister Y B Chavan. The fleet was led by the newly inducted aircraft carrier INS Vikrant.

After that the fleet review were held on many occasions. The review kept getting bigger and better. The best and the biggest one was on 1989 with 2 aircraft carriers and a flypast by 39 naval aircraft.

A great article from which I collected a lot of info was this article by the ex navy chief Admiral J G Nadkarni (Retd).

Let us concern ourselves with the planes in the stamps. The First stamp features the Sea Harrier. A plane if you ask me, deserves a postage stamp of its own. A beautiful piece of work and the stamp doesn't do it much justice.

The next stamp contains the Sea king chopper. Something that I am fond of only for the reason that if sometime my ship gets in any trouble, this is the one that will in all likelihood be sent to fish me out of trouble.

I am not sure what the third plane is, but it seems to be some sort of a surveillance plane of the Navy / coast guard.


Finally I wanted to put in a picture of this fleet review. The Prsident was Dr A P J Abdul Kalam. A person I liked immensely and he is flanked by the Naval Chief at that time.