Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 11

All examinations of the Indian Air Force will now be conducted online. The Raksha Rajya Mantri Subhash Bhamre inaugurated the online examination web portal of Indian Air Force.Online testing, or examination, will commence from January 2018 for Air Force Common Admission Test (AFCAT) for Officer’s cadre and scheduled test for Airmen Recruitment (STAR). Online registration commences on December 15.Earlier, the Air Force had hundred plus centres across India for officer-cadre exam and 14 centres for airmen selection exams. Certain states and UTs did not have any such centre.Consequently, candidates had to spend considerable time and resources on travelling to the test centres.In the new system, there would be about 760 examination centre’s all over the country and the maximum distance a candidate would be required to travel now will be considerably less from the place of his/her residence.It will enable approximately four lakh candidates for Airmen selection and two lakh candidates for officer’s selection, to appear in the exam every six months. The existing system had restrictions of geographical reach.The Air Force is the first amongst the three services to take up Information Technology-enabled online examination. The C-DAC, a Government of India agency, has developed the software for it.