The Chinese military today mourned the death of its air force service personnel who were killed in a recent crash of an aircraft during training.
A ceremony was held at a military base in the southwest Guizhou province to mourn the death, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Though there is no official acknowledgement about the number of the personnel killed in the January 29 plane crash, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported that 12 personnel lost their lives.
There was also no official mention of the make of the aircraft.
The crashed aircraft was a new type of refuelling plane modified from the air force's Y-8 transport aircraft, the Post report on February 1 said.
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) air force plane crashed in Guizhou during a training session on January 29.
The staff aboard the plane died, the Xinhua report said.
On Friday, they were honoured as revolutionary martyrs by the air force of the Southern Theatre Command.
The incident evoked rare criticism from the military officials saying that it had exposed the "fatal gap" between the air force's ambitions and its technology.
"There were about a dozen men and women on board and none of them managed to escape when the plane went down," an official, requesting anonymity, told the Post.
"There are no ejection seats on those aircraft, so the pilots and crew members would have been relying on the parachute packs on board. But they wouldn't have had enough time to jump because the aircraft fell so fast," he said.
The incident had undermined the morale of the air force because it happened just a few weeks after a J-15 carrier- based fighter jet crashed, the official said.
Another official told the Post that there was growing concern in the air force that there could be more accidents as flight drills were stepped up.
Since he took office, Chinese President Xi Jinping has been pushing all three forces of the military to go for life fire drills depicting battle conditions to win wars.
Another official said "we must recognise that in China, there is a fatal gap between the air force's combat-ready training and its imperfect aircraft development".
"Both the Y-8 and J-15 have some problems, including the engines, aircraft design and modifications. But instead of carrying out more test flights, the pilots are pushed directly to fly the warplanes, even though they're imperfect, because there is this political mission to 'build a combat-ready fighting force," he was quoted as saying by the Post.
Chinese pilots were taught that saving the aircraft, not their personal safety, was the top priority, he said.
"This type of training and education has pushed China's aircraft development forward, but at what cost? Life is precious," the official said.
The ceremony was attended by military leaders and members of the armed forces, local officials and relatives of the martyrs.
Ensuring flight safety is the common pursuit of air forces all over the world, an official statement reads.
The PLA air force will continue military training under combat conditions with tough and strict standards and enhance its capability to win wars, it added.
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