Air Marshal Nur Khan was 18 years old when he was commissioned in the IAF in January 1941. Earlier, he had attended the Royal Indian Military College at Dehra Dun after completing his education at Atchison College, Lahore. Notable amongst his assignments before partition was that of a Flight Commander in No 4 Squadron. In the RPAF, he held various key appointments including command of Chaklala and Mauripur stations and, as an Air Commodore, of No 1 Group at Peshawar. In 1959, Air Marshal Nur Khan was deputed to head the amalgamated Pakistan Airlines Corporation where he remained till taking over from Air Marshal Asghar Khan in July 65. During that period, he made a name for his airline as a safe and reliable organisation, and for himself as a dynamic go-getter. It was not surprising therefore that he was named as Air Marshal Asghar Khan’s successor; he was then 42 years old.

At the outset of Air Marshal Nur Khan’s tenure, the PAF became engaged in a war which had been simmering for some time and which did not catch any thinking person unawares. Nur Khan seized the finely honed instrument of war he had just inherited and held it poised, while the rest of the national war machinery seemed unable to throw of the ‘no war’ spell cast upon it by the foreign office.

It was immediately after that war, however, that Nur Khan faced his real challenge. Over a period of nearly ten years, the US aid programme had lulled the PAF into a false sense of security with regard to where the next squadron was coming from, so to speak. Not withstanding the abrupt termination of the aid agreement, Nur Khan stepped into the breach with confidence to recast the PAF in an entirely new, self-made mould.

Amongst the measures which Air Marshal Nur Khan implemented while restructuring the air force inventory was the creation of an operations command which rectified the anomaly of Air Headquarters staff trying to be critics of their own operational policies.

From: The Story of The Pakistan Air Force – A Saga of Courage and Honour