The Indian Airforce lost yet another of its technically upgraded MiG-21 BIS fighters on Tuesday morning when the jet on its final landing approach to the Air Force base at Ambala, evidently lost power and crashed into paddy fields near Rajpura on the Delhi-Amritsar Highway.
The pilot, Flt. Lt. Arunav Ghosh, had a most fortunate escape when he managed to eject precious seconds before his plane hit the ground barely a kilometre away.
Workers at a cardboard factory told the police, the dangerously low flying aircraft suddenly appeared in the sky and seemed to weave around before exploding on impact into a rice field outside Mehmudpur Maujan Village. The crash location is 30 km from Chandigarh.
Farm hands tending crops rushed to the pilot’s assistance even as an IAF search and rescue helicopter arrived to pick him up. IAF officials said he was “unhurt” but nonetheless admitted to the Military Hospital at Ambala Cantonment for observation.
Meanwhile, the crash site was cordoned off by IAF crews who recovered most of the wreckage including the flight data recorder, which will form part of the mandatory court of inquiry that will follow the incident. Of the five air accidents that the IAF has suffered this year, as many as four involved MiG fighters. An identical MiG-21 BIS crashed near Bikaner killing its pilot only last month and earlier, in February, another such aircraft came down during a training mission in Sheopur, Madhya Pradesh.
Slated to be eventually phased out after more than half a century of active service including three wars, the ageing MiG-21 has been the IAF’s worst killer earning it the ops room sobriquet “widow-maker” or “flying coffin.” Nearly half of almost a thousand machines inducted into the force since the early 1960’s, have been lost to mishaps.
Several former pilots say that while the MiG-21 had an airframe and design that was far ahead of its time when first built, the aircraft’s operational capabilities suffered greatly because of the uncertainty of spares and maintenance in the post-Soviet Union years.