It’s not just China, India is also buying and building aircraft carriers

As China commissioned its first-ever aircraft carrier aviation unit, Asia’s other rising power, India, gave its carrier aviators a serious equipment upgrade with the introduction of 16 brand-new Russian-made MiG-29K and four MiG-29KUB carrier-borne fighters earlier this week.

India has operated old British aircraft carriers for decades. Right now it flies aging Sea Harrier jump jets from INS Viraat, formerly the Royal Navy carrier Hermes. These Sea Harriers are subsonic attack planes with limited payloads operating from a carrier that was built in the 1950s.

The supersonic MiG-29K is an updated, naval version of the Soviet Union’s 1980s-vintage MiG-29, which was designed to counter U.S. Air Force F-15s and F-16s in the skies over Europe should the Cold War ever turn hot. The planes are way faster than the 1980s-vintage Sea Harriers and can carry more weapons capable of shooting down enemy planes and hitting enemy ships.

The Indian navy’s new MiGs are going to be flown off of India’s newest carrier, the former Soviet navy "aircraft-carrying cruiser" Admiral Gorshkov. That vessel has been massively refurbished at a Russian shipyard into the soon-to-be delivered INS Vikramaditya, a full-on carrier that, after much work, looks remarkably similar to China’s first carrier, the Liaoning — herself an old Soviet carrier. (Vikramaditya is supposed to be delivered to the Indian navy sometime this year.)

(China is also reportedly building at least two aircraft carriers of its own, set to enter service in the next decade.)

India will get a second squadron’s worth of MiG-29Ks to fly off its first locally made carrier, the INS Vikrant, which is slated for delivery in 2015. (Click here to see great images of her under construction and get a primer on the delays that have troubled India’s carrier program.)  

So yeah, China isn’t the only Asian nation that’s building up its carrier force.

And keep in mind that India has one distinct advantage over China when it comes to carrier operations: it has been operating fighter jets from aircraft carriers for more than 50 years. It can take decades to master the art of flying fast jets off of the relatively tiny, floating airfields. Still MiG-29s are much bigger airplanes than the Sea Harriers and they can’t just land vertically on a flight deck, as a Harrier can. This means that Indian navy pilots will have to relearn one of the toughest skills in aviation; landing on a pitching, rolling flight-deck and snagging an arrestor cable to come to a stop in a couple of hundred feet.