29 Planes Lost in a Year

By Samar Halarnkar

An Indian Air Force MiG-21 aircraft, probably a trainer, crashed on Thursday night (13 July 2000), killing both pilots a routine sortie from Kalaikunda airbase in West Bengal, according to defence sources in the capital.

The pilots were identified as Wing Commander A. K. Morgain and Squadron Leader V. K. Srivastav.

Morgain and Srivastav join a death roll of pilots that has grown at a disastrous rate. In 1999 there were 28 peace time crashes, the highest in the 1990s. In that decade, according to its own submission to Parliament, IAF lost 80 pilots and 185 aircraft, or almost a fourth of its fleet in the past decade alone. The loss is estimated at nearly Rs. 7,000 crore.

Many crashes involve the aircraft that plunged to the ground 6 km short of its base in Midnapore on Thursday night: the MiG-21, some of which are two decades old.

But the Indian Air Force's basic problem is that it does not have a jet trainer on which young pilots can make the tricky transition from propeller-driven aircraft to jets; and the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft, which was supposed to first fly in the late 1990s is still another three years—at least—from squadron service.

In 1991, the Soviet Union came apart and so too, in a sense, the IAF. More than two-thirds of its aircraft were from the erstwhile Soviet Union. At the best of times aircraft use an enormous number of spares, but the ageing MiG-21 and Mi-8 (helicopter) fleets demanded even more. Though the MiG-21s and MiG-27s were being manufactured under licence by HAL, a number of critical items were supplied by the Soviets.

The shortage of spares sent the IAF into a tailspin. During the next six years, the accident rate shot up sharply, averaging some 25 mishaps a year. While the exact number of fighters involved is classified, one expert cites government figures to state that in the period 1991-1997, the IAF was losing 3.99 MiGs for every 10,000 hours of flying, a rate which compared unfavourably with that of the British Royal Air Force's 0.21 per 10,000 flying hours.

Government figures show that between 1991 and 1997, the IAF lost 63 pilots and 147 aircraft to accidents.

Courtesy: India Today (14 July 2000)