Jaguar crashes again and shocks Indian Air Force

Information about this accident was confirmed by Indian Defense Ministry spokesman - Manish Ojha and said that the accident scene was identified near Beraja-Ramaniya village, in Gujarat state (India).

Debris was scattered over a 2-mile radius, indicating that the fighter jet exploded before hitting the ground. The pilot, Sanjay Chauhan, was seriously injured and died after being rushed to hospital.

Authorities are currently actively searching for the black box to investigate the cause of this unfortunate accident.

This is the second time an Indian Jaguar fighter jet has crashed in the last two years. The previous incident occurred in August 2016 during a training exercise also on the western coast of Gujarat.

The New Indian Express reported that fortunately the pilot was said to have parachuted safely: "The single-seater Jaguar crashed just minutes after leaving Bhuj airbase due to a technical problem."

The Jaguar crash comes just eight days after an Indian Air Force HAL Dhruv multi-role helicopter crashed, killing five people. Clearly, the Indian Air Force needs to review its aviation maintenance practices. This is reportedly the 14th serious incident in the aircraft’s more than 10 years of operation.

According to data obtained by The Aviationist, in just the past 3 years, the Indian Air Force has suffered losses of over 30 fighter planes and 6 pilots.

The most crashed aircraft in India were MiG-21 interceptors, followed by MiG-27s.

In particular, even the country's new generation of fighter jets have been continuously having accidents such as the Su-30MKI, Mirage-2000... and especially on March 28, a C-130J Hercules manufactured by the US. The continuous accidents of Indian military aircraft are explained by experts with many different reasons.

The Aviationist believes that not only the MiG-21 but any aircraft in the Indian Air Force can turn into a flying coffin for many different reasons.

The first reason is poor maintenance: Expensive fighter jets being exposed to harsh weather conditions is a common sight in the Indian Air Force, while the electronic equipment is extremely sensitive and difficult to handle. The Indian Air Force has recently undertaken a series of projects to build hangars to store the aircraft.

Take the example of the Su-30Ks that India returned to Russia after receiving the full number of Su-30MKIs: After only 10 years of use, they have degraded miserably. Their mid-life overhaul costs almost as much as buying new aircraft.

There are many errors in the assembly and spare parts manufacturing process: The accident rate of the new MiG-21 assembled and modernized domestically by India is many times higher than that of the Chinese J-7 copycat as well as the old MiG-21 used for many years by other countries.

After investigation, Russian experts concluded that the process of assembling and manufacturing aircraft spare parts in India has many extremely serious and unacceptable errors.

Most recently, France's Dassault also refused to provide warranty for Rafales that would be assembled domestically by India because of concerns that they would not be made properly and that the Indians might turn them into "flying coffins".