One of the first group of Indian officers who were seconded to the Royal Air Force in 1940, Ranjan Dutt was sent to England later that year and after further training became one of three Indian pilots to be posted to 32 Squadron. In 1941 he flew fighter sweeps over occupied France and the Netherlands, one of the few Indian pilots to serve in the European theatre during the Second World War, before returning to India via RAF service in the Middle East.

Serving in the India and Burma theatre for the rest of the war, after independence in 1947 he continued his career in the Indian Air Force. He saw action during the 1947-48 Kashmir operations, thereafter rising to senior rank as AOC Training Command. After that posting he was on secondment to Hindustan Aircraft Ltd, where as managing director he subsequently played an important role in procurement programmes for the IAF.

Born in 1921, he was educated at the Prince of Wales’s Royal Indian Military College at Dehra Dun, the alma mater of numerous Indian and Pakistani senior officers. He learnt to fly privately while still a boy, and took his “A” licence at 16.

On August 1, 1940, he was commissioned on to the 4th pilots’ course of the IAF, then an auxiliary air force of the Indian Empire. Within a fortnight he was on his way by ship to Britain with the rest of the course’s 24 pilot trainees. Arriving by ship on October 8, 1940, they were sent for further flying training and then to operational training units (OTUs).

Posted to 32 Squadron which operated Hurricanes, he took part in sorties over the German-occupied Continent and also escorted bomber raids to Norway. He was next posted to 94 Squadron in Egypt, where its Hurricanes were involved in sorties over the Western Desert.

In 1942 he returned to India where he was one of the first Indian instructors at 151 OTU at Risalpur, before being posted to 4 Squadron, Indian Air Force, at Kohat from where he flew frontier surveillance sorties. In 1944 he served with an RAF squadron in the Arakan, and subsequently took part in IAF air operations in Hurricanes over the crucial Battle of Imphal.

In April 1945 he came back to the UK as one of the first Indian pilots to be selected for the Day Fighter Leader course at Tangmere, Sussex, and also had an opportunity to acquaint himself with such early British jets as the Gloster Meteor. He was also able to fly captured German fighters, describing the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 as a “wonderful aircraft”. In India 20 years later while managing director of Hindustan Aircraft he was able to discuss its qualities in detail with its designer, Kurt Tank, who was designing a fighter for the IAF.

In August 1945 he was posted as a flight commander to 8 Squadron, the IAF’s first Spitfire squadron, introducing to it many of the tactics he had learnt at Tangmere. In 1946, promoted to squadron leader, he was given command of 1 Squadron IAF in Quetta. On independence and partition, No 1 was allocated to Pakistan and Dutt made his way back to India.

After reaching India, he was almost immediately asked by Air HQ to return to Pakistan and escort a group of Indian airmen and their families back to India on a special train. Trains had been a frequent target for massacres, and Dutt had been warned by an RAF intelligence officer that his train was to be attacked. He had the men issued with sten guns, and spent the entire journey in the cab of the locomotive, encouraging the clearly hostile driver and fireman to play along by a judicious display of his personal sidearm, a 9mm Luger.

During the Kashmir operations of 1947-48 he served as senior air staff officer of what was at that time the IAF’s only operational group, planning operations and flying his Hawker Tempest on a number of attacks on the strategically important Kishenganga Bridge. For this he was awarded the Vir Chakra. Rising rapidly up the ranks, Dutt twice commanded No 1 Air Force Academy, and also came again to Britain to attend the RAF Staff College Andover, Hampshire. He was AOC-in-C Training Command, 1959-61, and in 1961 went to Hindustan Aircraft (now Hindustan Aeronautics).

As managing director he insisted on flying HAL’s flagship indigenous product of the era, the HF24 Marut fighter bomber, which had been designed by Kurt Tank.

When the IAF was looking for a new generation supersonic interceptor he himself flew and evaluated a number of Mach 2 candidates for the job, the English Electric Lightning, the Dassault Mirage III and the MiG 21, eventually settling for the Russian design, which became one of the most widely used fighters in the world. Under his leadership Hindustan Aeronautics built 450 MiG 21s.

After retiring from the air force in 1968 as AOC-in-C Eastern Air Command, Dutt spent some time in Europe, returning to India two years ago to live with his son in Chennai, on the southeast coast, where he died.

Air Vice-Marshal Ranjan Dutt, Second World War veteran and AOC-in-C Training Command Indian Air Force, 1959-61, was born on September 30, 1921. He died on August 13, 2009, aged 87