MiG-27 aircraft crashes near Pokhran Range, pilot safe

In yet another accident involving an Indian Air Force fighter jet, a MiG-27 on a training mission from Jaisalmer crashed near Pokhran Range on Tuesday evening.

News agency ANI reported that the fighter jet crashed around 1810 hours while on a training mission. The pilot reportedly managed to eject safely.

A Court of Inquiry has been ordered the investigate the cause of the accident.

This is the third such accident involving an IAF jet in the past one month. On January 28, a Jaguar plane had crashed into a farm and burst into flames in UP's Kushinagar. The pilot of the jet, which had taken off from the Gorakhpur air base, had managed to eject safely.

On February 1, a Mirage 2000 trainer fighter aircraft crashed at Yemlur Airport in Bengaluru. Both test pilots died in the incident.

In September last year, a MiG-27 fighter jet had crashed near Jodhpur after the pilots had managed to eject safely. 

The MiG-27 was originally built by the Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau in the Soviet Union but is now produced in India by Hindustan Aeronautics as the Bahadur ("Valiant"). Though this aircraft is based on the MiG-23 fighter aircraft, it is optimized for air-to-ground attack. The MiG-27 is currently used by Indian, Kazakh and Sri Lankan Air Forces in the ground attack role.