Completed Investigation Into Mid-Air “Collision” Between Two IAF Planes

An accident involving two fighter jets from the Indian Air Force (IAF), an SU-30MKI and a Mirage-2000, has been fully investigated. The findings of the Court of Inquiry (CoI) will be sent to the Air Headquarters after the proper steps have been taken. This was a mid-air collision during close combat manoeuvres.

“The CoI is done, and the results have been sent to the Command. “It will be sent to the Air Headquarters after going through the necessary steps, which include legal review,” a defence source said.

The results of the investigation will show what exactly happened, but sources say that the two fighter jets crashed while practising close-combat manoeuvres with a third plane. In addition to the flight data recorders and other digital evidence and the two pilots of the plane that crashed but got out safely, the pilots of the third plane are important witnesses in the investigation.

Key witnesses

On the morning of January 28, the two doomed planes and another fighter jet took off from the Gwalior air base in Madhya Pradesh on a training mission for close combat. This is when the accident happened. The Mirage crashed right away in Morena, killing Wing Commander Hanumanth Rao Sarathi. The Sukhoi, on the other hand, flew for a while before crashing in Bharatpur, Rajasthan. This gave the two pilots time to get out of the plane safely. A CoI was put together right away, and an Air Commodore was put in charge of it.

The IAF’s Mirage-2000 fleet and the best training centre, Tactics and Air Combat Development Establishment (TACDE), are both based at the Gwalior airbase. TACDE is like the U.S. Navy’s “Top Gun” academy.

Air accidents

In a report from March 2022, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defense was worried about air accidents. In response, the Defense Ministry said that there were 105 aircraft accidents each year during the Eleventh and Twelfth Five-Year Plans.

“In the 11th plan (April 1, 2007 to March 31, 2012), there were an average of 13 plane accidents a year. In the 12th plan, there are an average of 8 accidents a year” (April 01, 2012 to March 31, 2017). During the 13th five-year Defense plan, there have been an average of six accidents per year. “The number of accidents was the lowest in the last 50 years in the last Financial Year (2020-21),” it said.

In February 2021, a report from a standing committee of parliament said that, with the planes they had at the time, the IAF had flown about 2.5 lakh hours per year for the past 20 years. It also said that during that time, the IAF worked hard to lower the number of accidents.

“Comparing safety records over a five-year period, the data below show that the accident rate has gone down a lot in the last 20 years,” said the report.