An Indian Air Force Wing Commander was killed when a Tejas fighter jet crashed during a display at the Dubai Air Show on Friday.
Angad Singh, an aerospace analyst and author, told The Telegraph Online that the senior pilot in the cockpit of India’s indigenously built fighter jet had “more than 20 years of flying experience” and was “a pro pilot, a good human being and a patriot to his core”.
The pilot’s name has not been released by the IAF at the time of writing this story, although the Himachal Pradesh chief minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu has put out a post on X identifying him.
“He was among the best in the cockpit,” said Singh, who knew the pilot. “This loss is deeply personal for many of us.”
About the reason behind the crash, Singh said it was too early to draw conclusions. “Anything said now will be speculative,” he cautioned. “There will be an inquiry and only after that can the actual cause be known.”
The single-seat Tejas went down around 2.10pm local time at Al Maktoum International Airport, sending a column of black smoke rising over the airshow grounds.
The IAF has said a court of inquiry will investigate the cause of the accident.
New Delhi has been promoting Tejas as an export-ready fighter and is in discussions with Egypt and Argentina. The jet’s appearance in Dubai was meant to showcase India’s capacity to design, field and sell a modern combat aircraft.
Pushan Das, who leads the aerospace & defence portfolios for the US-India Business Council in India, said that the crash was unlikely to create long-term damage to India's Tejas indigenous fighter jet programme.
“Such incidents, while tragic, are relatively common worldwide during air shows and rehearsals,” Das said. “One crash does not define an aircraft’s overall safety record.”
This is the second crash in Tejas’s 24-year flying history. The first, in March 2024 near Jaisalmer, ended with the pilot ejecting safely.
Tejas, conceived in the late 1970s to replace ageing MiG-21s, is the product of a decades-long effort to build an indigenous aerospace base. Approved in 1983, the Light Combat Aircraft programme created the Aeronautical Development Agency in Bengaluru to design the aircraft, while HAL handled manufacturing.
The jet features a tailless delta-wing design, composite materials, fly-by-wire controls and a multirole weapons suite.
The IAF inducted it into service with No. 45 Squadron in 2016 and No. 18 Squadron in 2020, and the government has ordered 83 Mk-1A variants with another 97 approved.