On August 5, 2023, during the initial opening before the inaugural ceremony of National Aerospace Science and Technology Park (NASTP), Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu, Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), Pakistan Air Force (PAF), while expressing his views said, “We live in a challenging time in the wake of evolving global and regional environment. This is an era of transition that has induced the need to induct niche and disruptive technologies, which has subsequently affected the traditional concept of national security and defense.”

While appreciating the vision of national leadership, the Air Chief emphasized that to address the contemporary challenges, the national leadership of Pakistan has envisioned the establishment of a Special Investment Facilitation Council to create desired linkages and provide opportunities to different platforms for bringing Foreign Direct Investment in Pakistan. He further highlighted that PAF has also planned to play its role in the ongoing national building projects under the umbrella of SIFC, predominantly in the aerospace and IT domains.
CAS declared NASTP a significant landmark. A multi-layered project based on a hybrid model would cover the private sector and aerospace clusters across all major cities of Pakistan. Underscoring the project’s distinctiveness, CAS further said, “The biggest hallmark of the NASTP project is its Aviation Design and Innovation Center comprising techno parks, IT clusters, nurseries and basic incubation centers making the project diversified and unprecedented in the history of Pakistan.” He added that the NASTP has also focused on the much-needed triple helix model to embed a culture of sustainability since its core objectives include building local industry and creating an interface between the public sectors. CAS highlighted that through the NASTP project, PAF is bringing all organic setups to one place, including nanotechnology, space, cyber, artificial intelligence, supercomputing, networking and algorithms, in order to facilitate entrepreneurship and technological skill development in the country.                                            
In his concluding remarks, Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu commended the stakeholders’ efforts to accomplish this mega project in a record time of one year. He also lauded the efforts all the team members involved in various sectors put in to make the project a great success.