MiG - Mighty

Almighty Aviation industry needs sacrifice for growth and innovation. Indian pilots are being sacrificed every now and then in the name of corrupt bureaucracy. A total of more than 160 Indian Air Force pilots have been killed in crashes flying MiG fighter jets. This count is from 1971 to 72 and 2004 to 2006. Not only pilots are being beheaded, innocent civilians are forced to give lives in split seconds. Crashes have yielded a loss of $400 million in these periods.

Some of the causes given to press by Authorities are: due to birds or pilot’s negligence or pilot’s lack of skill. Technical faults are being covered-up drastically. If analyzed down the line of our memories, how many airline crashes have we heard due to birds or the fowls interference. If you compare the density of air traffic of commercial airlines and regular exercise flights, there are more MiG crashes in regular exercise flights than commercial air routines.
Coming to negligence or lack of skill is really joke, 2 to 3 crashes are acceptable due to this reason, but I imagine pilots go through rigorous training wherein they are trained to take decisions in mil-seconds. We are spending billions of dollars in purchasing fighter planes like these. Why aren’t we thriving ourselves to produce those in-house. Indian Pilots are valuable resources and have very less service span. They need to be preserved skilfully for their service in disaster situations. We can easily justify by now that – these crashes are due technical reasons, not because of flying skills.

Mr Vladimir Barkovsky, the Deputy Chief Designer of MiG Corporation once had raised the issue as - the delay in the induction of indigenous intermediate jet trainer by India was the main cause of the high accident rate of MiG-21s.

I am compiling an article in one of journal to brief on the tests conducted for MiG few years back, which is as follows:

LIMA - A MiG-29 jet crashed Tuesday as it was being tested to see if it was obsolete and part of a scheme by disgraced Vladimiro Montesinos to steal millions of dollars. A congressional commission ordered the tests after reports that Montesinos ordered the jets in the early 1990s and Russia Belarus as part of a scam in which he siphoned off $48 million from the deals. There have been numerous reports that the planes were in poor shape when they were bought. The military initially blamed the accident on a bird strike, but congressional observers, who were only a couple of hundred yards from where the plane went down, said the crash was due to technical problems. The military later acknowledged the planes have had technical difficulties.

Why are our authorities not taking serious steps to eradicate this ritual of sacrificing pilots ?