Defense officials said on Sunday that the Court of Inquiry (CoI) will be led by an IAF officer with the rank of Air Commodore or higher. The CoI will look into the crash of two IAF jets on Saturday, in which one pilot died. They said that the CoI will also have fighter pilots, as well as technical and medical officers.
The Mirage 2000 and the Sukhoi 30 (Su-30 MKI) fighter jets crashed in Morena, Madhya Pradesh, and nearby Bharatpur, Rajasthan, during a close combat training mission. This was part of the fighter combat leader course run by the Tactics and Air Combat Development Establishment in Gwalior.
Saturday morning, the two planes took off from the Gwalior air base. Wing Commander Hanumanth Rao Sarathi was a leader at TACDE. He died in the crash. Before the plane crashed at Bharatpur, the two Su-30 pilots who were taking the course got out of the plane safely.
Sources hinted that the two planes might have hit each other in the air, but there was no official confirmation of this.
The CoI will figure out the exact reason by, among other things, looking at the flight data recorders that were found in the wreckage of both planes and talking to all IAF members who were on the mission.
A report from PTI says that IAF teams looked at the wooded area where the plane crashed on Saturday. The Mirage 2000’s flight data recorder has been found, and so far only a piece of the Su-30’s has been found.
Officers said that bad weather, which is a common cause of plane crashes, probably wasn’t one of the reasons for the latest crash, since training missions are usually avoided when the weather is bad.
Both the Mirage 2000 and the Su-30 jets have a good safety record when they are in the air. Since 2010, the Mirage 2000 has been in five crashes. One of them happened in October 2021 in the Bhind district of Madhya Pradesh. Since 2010, about 10 Su-30s have gone down. Mirage 2000 is a smaller and lighter plane than the Su-30 MKI.
In 2017, the government told Parliament that it was taking different steps to stop accidents. This includes preventive steps like reviving the Aviation Safety Organization, making it easier to report accidents and incidents, doing analytical studies and quality audits of aircraft fleets to find weak spots and keep planes from crashing.
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