Pervaiz Mehdi Qureshi
Pakistani retired four-star air officer
Parvaiz Mehdi Qureshi (born 1 October 1943) best known as PQ Mehdi, is a retired four-star air officer and former fighter pilot who served as the eighth Chief of Air Staff (CAS) of the Pakistan Air Force from 1997 until his retirement in 2000.
His tenure in command of the Pakistan Air Force is notable for the events involving the short-lived military conflict with the Indian Army in Kargil in 1999. He is credited with advising Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif against all-out war with India, eventually providing an exit for the Pakistan Army to deescalate the situation through diplomacy with India.
Early life
Parvaiz Mehdi Qureshi was born in Phalia, Punjab, into a Punjabi family on 1 October 1943.
Military career
After graduating from Govt Pilot Secondary School Phalia, Mehdi joined the Pakistan Air Force in 1961, and shared a room with subsequent army chief General Musharraf and future Pakistan Navy chief Aziz Mirza, who became his lifelong friends.
After their interview with the local commandants, Mehdi, Musharraf, and Mirza went to see the acclaimed Urdu movie Savera (lit. Dawn). The next day, all three were notified to report back to their respective academies for training. Mehdi enrolled in the PAF Academy in Risalpur, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and passed out in the class of the 38th GD Pilot course, where he was also conferred with the Sword of Honour by the Commandant of the academy in 1964.
After being commissioned and assigned to No.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pervaiz Mehdi Qureshi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.