Retiring the MiG-21

Govt must procure modern fighter aircraft

For decades now, there has been a grim inevitability about the periodic news of another, and then yet another, crash of the Indian Air Force’s (IAF’s) frontline MiG-21 fighter, all too often accompanied by the bleak announcement that the pilot, often two of them, had been unable to bale out and lost their lives. The statistics are astonishing: Of the 874 MiG-21 fighter variants that entered the IAF service since 1963, more than 400 — or almost half the overall number — were lost to crashes. Some 200 IAF pilots lost their lives in these flying accidents because, for one