Roshan Goonetileke
Sri Lankan Air Force officer
Marshal of the Air Force W. D. M. J. Roshan Goonetileke, RWP and bar, VSV, USP (born 28 February 1956), is a Sri Lankan senior air force officer. He was a former Governor of the Western Province of Sri Lanka.
Born to Air Chief Marshal Harry Goonatilake, he joined the Sri Lanka Air Force along with his younger brother Shirantha Goonatilake, who was later killed in action in 1995. Goonatilake served as a pilot in both fixed and rotary wing aircraft, flying operational sorties and served as the commanding officer of No. 03 Maritime Squadron and No. 04 Helicopter Wing. His higher commands included Zonal Commander and SLAF Base commander stints, Director Operations, Deputy Chief of Staff Operations and Chief of Staff, before appointment as Commander of the Sri Lankan Air Force in 2006, serving till 2011. He was appointed Chief of the Defence Staff in 2009 in an acting capacity which was confirmed in 2012 and he stepped down in 2013, retiring from the Air Force. He was restored to active service in 2019, when he became the first to be appointed to the rank of Marshal of the Sri Lanka Air Force.
Early life
Born on 28 February 1956, to Harry Goonatilake and Marian Perera, he had a younger brother Shirantha Goonatilake and two sisters.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Roshan Goonetileke” is sri Lankan Air Force officer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Roshan, Goonetileke and Lankan, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7368809. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1995, 2006 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roshan Goonetileke” 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.