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India’s MiGs fall down, go BOOM!
The lavish welcome laid on by India for this week's official visit of Russia's Vladimir Putin was looking like a love-in until somebody mentioned the word "MiG." In the last five years, India's elderly Soviet-built MiG-21 warplanes have suffered 110 crashes, and the Indian media have started calling the plane "widow-maker." Must be a bitch getting pilots to re-up. The Russians, saying that this crash rate was five times higher than their own, blame pilot error and false economies by the Indian Air Force, which tried to save money by buying "non-authorized" spare parts for the aircraft. This infuriates the Indians, who point out that since Russia no longer makes the MiG-21, nor its spares, they have to buy them somewhere. Joe's Discount MiG Parts, cash only Nikolai Nikitin, MiG's director-general, is offering to take over the servicing and logistics for the elderly aircraft from India's Hindustan Aeronautics, which built the aircraft under license. The MiG-21 was phased out from Soviet service over 20 years ago. In fact Nikitin, who has lately seen the rival Russian Sukhoi-27 and Sukhoi-30 warplanes winning the big Indian contracts, will offer almost anything to get a new deal to provide MiGs to India, from the MiG-29K naval version for the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier to the wholly new MiG-29M fighter bomber. Nikitin is pushing the MiG-29K as an alternative to the French-built Mirage-2000 for India's nuclear-capable bomber fleet. But the MiG has a credibility problem. The MiG-21 crash rate of 2.81 per 10,000 flying hours is fearsomely high. Only one aircraft in the Indian inventory has a worse record -- the MiG-23. That's a ringing endorsment for you. No wonder everyone's standing in line to buy U.S. planes. Posted by: Steve 2002-12-05 |
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