Death by Flying Junk

New Delhi, August 6, 2011: Indian Air Force (IAF), the fourth largest force in the world, has lost 999 aircraft since 1970 bringing the average to an appalling 22 crashes every year. While the spate of accidents has led to loss of aircraft they have also come at a cost of immeasurable human resource - 170 young pilots. In the last five years alone 26 fighter jets have gone down.

Two fatal accidents in a span of week have brought into focus the chinks in IAF's capability, as it lacks basic trainer aircraft for initial training of its rookie pilots, is still operating the "obsolete" MiG-21s (IAF is the only air force in the world which is flying these aircraft now) and have overworked pilots resulting from the shortage of pilot officers and aircraft.

On Aug 2 the force lost yet another single-engine Soviet-vintage MiG-21, which accounts for nearly 62 percent of the crashes in IAF, and 24-year-old Flying Officer Suraj Pillai. The young pilot had opted to eject but apparently the canopy of his cockpit did not open resulting in his death.

The incident brought into focus the inherently dangerous MiG-21s. It is not without any basis they have earned the sobriquet of "flying coffins". Of the

793 MiG-21s inducted into the force since 1964 over 350 have been lost in accidents leaving about 170 pilots dead. With IAF spending close to Rs. 10 crores in the making of each fighter pilot the monetary loss, besides the immense the loss to family members and organisation, is huge.

The MiG-21 crashes are a mix of shoddy training and defective spare parts. Even though senior IAF officials term the aircraft "obsolete" now, IAF is forced to fly them at least till 2017.

"Because of the delay in acquisition of advanced jet trainers (AJTs) and LCA (Light Combat Aircraft) we cannot write them (MiG-21s) off," said former IAF vice chief Air Marshal (Retd) P K Barbora, who himself has flown this aircraft during his young days.

Presently, IAF has two squadrons of British-built AJTs but they are not enough to train all the rookie pilots. So, half the pilots after their initial training are sent to MiG Operational Flight Training Units (MOFTU) for further training on MiG-21s.

According to the Parliamentary Panel's report on Defence, "We have issues of AJT, which we did not have a number of years. So, our ab initio pilots were going straight from basic trainers to intermediate trainer and then straight on to the MiG-21 class of aircraft which was a tremendous jump."

However, IAF now does not even have basic trainer aircraft. As its entire fleet of initial trainers HPT-32 was grounded two years back following a series of crashes and over 100 engine failures. The air force had lost about 11 flying cadets to these aircraft.

But also retiring 5 squadrons of MiGs would also mean that IAF, which already has fighter strength of 33.5 fighter squadrons against the sanctioned strength of 39.5, would mean losing its conventional edge over adversaries.

On Aug 4, another young pilot Flight Lieutenant Siddharth Pandey perished when a British-built ground strike fighter jet Jaguar crashed 50 miles southeast of Gorakhpur airbase in Uttar Pradesh.

Work has been going to upgrade the avionics of Jaguar aircraft. Of the five squadrons operational in IAF, while three have been upgraded to Darin-II systems but the ones in Gorakhpur are Darin-I. Flt Lt Siddharth Pandey, who got posted to Gorakhpur recently, was earlier flying Darin-II Jaguars. Also he went into a flying after a long leave, it seems that he did not get enough conversion time to get into the flying groove.

Another factor plaguing the young pilots is the stress. With IAF short of around 449 pilots and the required flying hours remaining same for the force, it is the pilot who has to bear the brunt. The young pilots on condition of anonymity do accept: "The pressure is high. Half of the aircraft in the squadron would be under servicing. The fighter squadrons have shortage of manpower, but still we required to clock same flying hours sanctioned earlier."