These jets are 60 years old, more than half of them have crashed, and over 170 pilots died... but why do we still fly them?
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00:00Squadron leader Abhinav Choudhury, Flight Lieutenant Aditya Bal, Wing Commander M Rana,
00:05Wing Commander Harshad Sinha, Group Captain Ashish Gupta.
00:08These were among the people killed in the 8 MiG-21 crashes in just the last 2 years.
00:19But why do MiGs crash so often? And why do we still use them?
00:23To understand this, we need to look at the history of these fighter jets.
00:27The Soviet-origin aircraft, now ominously nicknamed the Flying Coffin,
00:31was first inducted into the Indian Air Force in 1963.
00:34They were meant to increase India's combat ability.
00:38But of the more than 800 MiGs purchased from Russia,
00:41over 400 have crashed, Defence Minister A.K. Antony told Parliament in 2012.
00:47More than 200 people were killed.
00:49The Soviets, who designed this aircraft, removed it from service in 1985.
00:54Even countries like Bangladesh and Afghanistan had removed it.
00:58In India too, the planes completed their retirement period in the mid-1990s.
01:03But we held on to them.
01:05There were a few reasons for this.
01:07It's not as though we're still using the same aircraft from the 1960s.
01:11They've been upgraded with new sensors and armament.
01:14Now, more than 60% of these planes are being built in India by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.
01:24It has been upgraded.
01:26It is not the old MiG-21 bis.
01:28It's got a better weapon system.
01:29It's got better radars, better air-to-air missiles.
01:32But the engines remain the same, said a former IAF commander.
01:36Some experts say that the MiG-21s form the bulk of the Air Force's inventory.
01:41With the Air Force at the strength of just 32 squadrons,
01:44as compared to the 42 mandated by the government,
01:47and delays in inducting the new fighter jets like Tejas and Rafale,
01:50the MiGs were needed to be able to protect our skies,
01:53said retired Air Vice Marshal Sunil Nanodkar.
01:56But their large numbers meant there was more use, and there were more crashes.
02:01Now, the Air Force was looking to phase the MiG-21s out completely by 2025.
02:06While each crash happens for a different reason,
02:09reports have broadly classified them into technical defects,
02:13human error and bird hits because it is a single-engine aircraft.
02:17Defence journalists have also blamed the crashes on shoddy maintenance and inadequate training.
02:22While there doesn't seem to be anything specifically wrong with the MiGs,
02:26some reports say that pilots have complained about
02:29certain models of the aircraft landing too fast.
02:32They also said they couldn't see the runway properly because of the window canopy.
02:36Back in 2014, the Air Force chief said India's security was threatened
02:40by delaying the removal of these old planes from service because parts of the fleet were outdated.
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