Slitherine

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India ended up operating 872 MiG-21s across various marks, and as of April last year had lost 482 aircraft and 171 pilots in accidents. When inducted just over 50 years ago, the type was the first combat aircraft of non-Western origin to fly with the Indian air force, and was also its first supersonic type.

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India has lost so many MiG-21 fighters that it is trying to retire this type of aircraft as quickly as possible. Over the last half century, India has bought 976 MiG-21s and over half are gone, mostly because of accidents. While India was something of an extreme case in this area (other users don't fly their MiG-21s as much), it's been typical of MiG aircraft.

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ORIGINAL: BASB

F105 Starfighters hundreds of them crashed over the years, in several different airforces.

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ORIGINAL: thewood1

Were any of those combat losses. Wasn't the 21 engaged in combat in 71?

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2) The loss rate of the MiG 21 is in no way worse than any similar fighter of its genre and better than most.

Applying western accident rates is also somewhat unrealistic because of significant decay in thrust and lift due to high air temperatures. A 12% decrease in lift or thrust can lead to a 100% difference between crashing or getting back safe. There being no easy mathematical co-relation.

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Since the 1960s India bought nearly a thousand MiG combat aircraft. Nearly 90 percent (872) were MiG-21s and 55 percent (482 aircraft) of these were lost in action (mainly accidents) along with 171 pilots. The other ones, swing-wing MiG-23s were more modern but not much more reliable. While India was something of an extreme case in this area (other users don't fly their MiGs as much), it's been typical of MiG aircraft.

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But India was not the only one, besides the Russians, who had problems with Russian made warplanes. During the Cold War the U.S. had several dozen Russian aircraft they used for training their fighter pilots. Despite energetic efforts to keep these aircraft flying their accident rate was 100 per 100,000 flying hours.

That's very high by U.S. standards. The new F-22 has an accident rate of about 6 per 100,000 hours, mainly because it's new. F-15s and F-16s have an accident rate of 3-4 per 100,000 flight hours. India, using mostly Russian aircraft, has an accident rate of 6-7 per 100,000 hours flown (compared to 4-5 for all NATO air forces). The B-52 has the lowest accident rate (less than 1.5 per 100,000 flying hours) of all American heavy bombers. The B-1s rate is 3.48.

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For example, in the early 1950s, the U.S. F-89 fighter had 383 accidents per 100,000 flying hours. A decade later the rate was in the 20s for a new generation of aircraft. At the time the F-4, which served into the 1990s, had a rate of under 5 per 100,000 hours.

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Most of the pilots lost in these Indian MiG-21 accidents were new pilots, which pointed out another problem. India has long put off buying jet trainers. New pilots go straight from propeller driven trainer aircraft to high performance jets like the MiG-21. This is made worse by the fact that the MiG-21 has always been a tricky aircraft to fly. That, in addition to it being an aircraft dependent on one low quality engine, makes it more understandable why so many MiGs were lost. And a lot were lost. The recently retired MiG-21FLs were used to help pilots get used to MiG-21s before going to a MiG-21 squadron.