Search and rescue operation underway after crash.
Two fighter jets of the Indian Air Force (IAF) crashed in the state of Madhya Pradesh during routine drills, NDTV reported on Saturday.
The publication stated that a search and rescue operation was underway. However, details of casualties hadn’t been received till the filing of this report.
As per the NDTV report, the downed jets included a Sukhoi Su-30 and a Mirage 2000 which had taken off from the Gwalior Air Force base.
The videos of the wrecked jets’ debris scattered on the ground in Morena area surfaced soon after the crash.
Meanwhile, the Indian military has set up a Court of Inquiry to probe the incident. The body will inquire whether the two jets witnessed mid-air collision.
“The Su-30 had 2 pilots while Mirage 2000 had one pilot during the crash. Initial reports suggest 2 pilots are safe while an IAF chopper reaching the location of the third pilot soon,” the publication quoted the defence sources as saying.
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Five Indian soldiers killed in chopper crash
Last year in October, five Indian army soldiers were killed when their helicopter crashed near the country’s disputed border with China, the defence ministry in the second such fatal accident in the region that month.
The Advance Light Helicopter came down south of Tuting, a remote town near the Line of Actual Control which divides India’s northeastern Arunachal Pradesh state from Chinese territory.
Air traffic controllers had received a mayday call before the crash that suggested technical or mechanical failure, the ministry said in a statement.
The accident came weeks after an Indian army pilot was killed while on a routine flight aboard a Cheetah helicopter at Tawang, further east in the state.
This was the second crash incident involving the army’s cheetah chopper in India in 2022. The first took place in March near the Line of Control in the Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir. The casualties in the incident were the same as in the latest crash.
