Pardon this exception of beginning an article with a poignant message of one of hundreds of mothers of brave aviators of Indian Air Force’s combat aircraft, many of which have been flown for much longer than they should have been.

Dear Citizens of India,
Another young man is gone. Flight Lieutenant Siddharth Yadav. Not martyred in war. Not killed in combat. But lost in a 46-year-old Jaguar jet that should have been grounded long before he was born. He died flying an aircraft that the rest of the world retired decades ago. An aircraft that, like the MiG-21, continues to haunt our skies, claiming the lives of our brightest and bravest, not because of enemy action, but because of our own apathy.

My son, Flight Lieutenant Abhijit Gadgil, died the same way in 2001. Since then, over 340 Indian Air Force aircraft have crashed. Over 150 pilots have died. The numbers are horrific. The silence around them, even worse.

And still, we carry on. No accountability. No reform. No outrage. What we get instead is advice. From ministers and bureaucrats who speak loftily of innovation and “deep tech” revolutions. Who blame young entrepreneurs and dreamers for not doing enough. While their own machinery, the PSUs, the defence research organisations, the state apparatus, continues to fail our armed forces, year after year.

We talk of becoming a global power. We demand respect on the world stage. But we send our officers into ancient aircraft, patched-up machines flying on borrowed time and borrowed parts. And we call it valour. It is not valour. It is violence. State-sanctioned violence against our own.

Siddharth was engaged. Ten days before the crash. He was building a life. And we gave him a coffin masquerading as a cockpit.

I do not want your condolences. I want you to remember. To rage. To demand better.

Do not salute their coffins and forget them by next week’s headlines. Do not reduce these boys to photo ops and patriotic hashtags. They deserved better. We owe them better.

Do not wait for the next crash to care.

Because if we do not act, another mother will be writing this letter. Another body will be draped in a flag. Another boy will never come back.

And another nation will shrug and move on.

Kavita Gadgil
(“Ma” to Flt Lt Abhijit Gadgil)

Litany of crashes

Within minutes of taking off on a routine night training flight, IAF’s ground-attack Jaguar trainer-fighter crashed in Jamnagar on 02 April 2025. Flt Lt Siddharth Yadav died in the crash before which his co-pilot ejected and is undergoing treatment in hospital.

A month earlier another Jaguar, on a day-training flight from its base at Ambala, crashed at Panchkula soon after take-off. The pilot flew the aircraft away from populated areas before ejecting safely. Between 2012 and 2018, six Jaguar jets reportedly crashed.

Air Marshal B.K. Pandey (Retd) wrote in SP’s Aviation in November 2021 that the Jaguar fleet of the IAF was not without problems when inducted in 1979. They came equipped with the first-generation inertial navigation and attack system named NAVWASS which was outdated and not very reliable. The Rolls-Royce Adour engines fitted on the aircraft were somewhat underpowered. The Jaguar also lacked autopilot which is a critical flying aid. 

To address these problems, the IAF and HAL launched the programme to upgrade the avionics of the aircraft. The first upgraded Jaguar aircraft fitted with DARIN III flew for the first time on August 10, 2017. It was also fitted with the state-of-the art AESA radar, 28 new sensors, autopilot and more. To address the problem of the aircraft being underpowered, the IAF planned to replace the Rolls-Royce Adour engines on 80 Jaguars in its fleet with the more powerful F-125IN engines to be supplied by Honeywell. 

Unfortunately, the price of the engine quoted by Honeywell for the F-125IN engine was as described by the IAF to be so exorbitant that it was unaffordable. The plan to fit new engines on the Jaguar fleet was thus abandoned in 2019. With all the upgrades in avionics and had the fleet been refitted with the more powerful Honeywell F-125IN engines, the Jaguar fleet of the IAF could have served for another two decades at the very least.

Other countries retired Jaguars

UK, Ecuador, France, Oman and Nigeria retired their Jaguars at least fighters years ago, with some on display in air museums in some of these countries.

MRO issues delay overhaul

While the IAF does not publicly disclose specific data on the monthly flying hours of any of its platforms, including Jaguars, industry sources indicated that Jaguars need about 20 hours of maintenance for each hour of flight. This means  the IAF, the world’s fourth largest air force, expends a major part of its energies on upgrades and retrofits of its long-held aircraft, instead of focusing its resources and planning on acquiring modern platforms, which are an important part of modernisation. IAF is also the only major air force that operates seven different fighters – Su-30MKIs, upgraded MiG-29 M's, retrofitted Mirage 2000Hs, Jaguars, MiG-21s and Rafales, making their maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) an ordeal.

Successive comptroller and auditor general and defence parliamentary committee reports have chastised the IAF for the poor operational readiness of its platforms, especially fighters. Senior IAF officers, declining to be identified, said these shortcomings were caused "almost exclusively" by MRO complications which collectively had hindered IAF attempts at evolving from a largely tactical force to a strategic one, capable of power projection and executing out-of-area exigencies.

Earlier this year, Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal AP Singh reportedly expressed frustration in scathing remarks at the very slow pace of delivery of the first batch of forty Tejas aircraft by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), which began in 2016, a rather too long period of eight years for a jet which took first flight in 1984.

Another IAF fighter jet whose dubious crash history has beaten the Jaguar’s hollow is the Soviet-made MIG 21. To date, more than 400 MiG-21 aircrafts have crashed killing more than 200 pilots, leading it to being referred to derisively as a “flying coffin” in aviation circles.

Despite Indian soldiers, sailors and airmen being acknowledged globally as the best, an enduring irony is that they have always been deprived of their best-in-class equipment to function effectively. When India attained freedom, its first prime minister rather naively believed that this country did not require an army - police was sufficient- and its second defence minister believed that ordnance factories were better off producing pressure cookers and coffee percolators, laying a foundation where the politico-bureaucratic establishment gave low priority to critical defence arms and equipment, ignoring to great costs sometime to urgent demands of the military hierarchy. High levels of bravery despite equipment shortcomings have lulled the decision makers into not responding with alacrity to defence acquisitions even if that meant an unconscionable cost in the lives of young fighter pilots. 

Have we as a nation become too insensitive to care?

(The author, a strategic affairs analyst, is a former spokesperson, Defence Ministry and Indian Army. Views are personal. He can be contacted at wordsword02@gmail.com)