Two Indian air force jets crash, one pilot killed

Two Indian air force fighter jets crashed on Saturday after becoming involved in an accident and one pilot was killed, the air force said.

“The aircraft were on routine operational flying training mission. One of the three pilots involved, sustained fatal injuries. An inquiry has been ordered to determine the cause of the accident,” the air force said in a statement.

The accident happened near the town of Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh state, it said.

Officials said earlier one of the aircraft came down in Madhya Pradesh and the other in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan.

The air force did not specify what type of aircraft were involved but media reported they were a Sukhoi-30 and a Mirage 2000.

Last year in October, five Indian army soldiers were killed when their helicopter crashed near the country’s disputed border with China, the defence ministry in the second such fatal accident in the region that month.

The Advance Light Helicopter came down south of Tuting, a remote town near the Line of Actual Control which divides India’s northeastern Arunachal Pradesh state from Chinese territory.

Air traffic controllers had received a mayday call before the crash that suggested technical or mechanical failure, the ministry said in a statement.

The accident came weeks after an Indian army pilot was killed while on a routine flight aboard a Cheetah helicopter at Tawang, further east in the state.

This was the second crash incident involving the army’s cheetah chopper in India in 2022. The first took place in March near the Line of Control in the Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir. The casualties in the incident were the same as in the latest crash.