The debris of MiG-21 in Kangra.A MiG-21 fighter jet of the Indian Air Force crashed on Wednesday in Patta Jatian village at Jawali area of Kangra district in Himachal Pradesh. The pilot was killed in the accident. “On Wednesday afternoon a MiG-21 aircraft, which was on a routine sortie, crashed at 1321 hrs in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh,” the IAF said. “The aircraft took off from Air Force Station Pathankot at 1220 hrs (12.20pm). The pilot sustained fatal injuries during the accident,” the IAF added. A court of inquiry (CoI) has been ordered to establish the cause of the accident. The single-engine MiG-21s, which were bought from Russia in the 1960s and 1970s, and underwent several life-extension and other upgradations in the last three decades, are slated to be completely phased out from the IAF within a couple of years. Kangra SP Santosh Patial said the pilot, identified as Squadron Leader Meet Kumar, had died in the accident. Soon after the crash, Air Force choppers with investigators landed on the spot and started investigation. In the last months, two such crashes were reported – one in Gujarat and the other in Maharashtra. In Gujarat, a Jaguar fighter aircraft crashed in Kutch district, soon after it took off from the Jamnagar airbase on June 5, killing a senior officer, who was on a routine sortie. Air Commodore Sanjai Chauhan, the Air officer commanding (AOC) of Air Force Station Jamnagar, who was flying the deep penetration warplane, died when the plane crashed in a field at Bareja village. In second incident, a Sukhoi-30 jet on a test-flight crashed in Maharashtra’s Nashik district on June 27. In that incident, however, both the pilots were able to eject safely. The Sukhoi-30MKI twinjet multirole air-superiority fighter of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), which was undertaking a pre-induction test-flight, crashed around 25km from Nashik shortly after taking off from the HAL airstrip near the city, the police said.
