Trainee IAF pilot killed in crash

Flight cadet Sparsh Rana was killed this morning on his second solo flight when his trainer aircraft crashed north of Hyderabad. The aircraf...

Flight cadet Sparsh Rana was killed this morning on his second solo flight when his trainer aircraft crashed north of Hyderabad. The aircraft, HPT-32 trainer, has had five casualties and more than 500 non-fatal incidents so far.

The 22-year-old pilot took off from the Air Force Academy (AFA) in Dundigul on a training-flying mission at 11.10 am, and disappeared from ground radar 20 minutes later. The aircraft crashed near a hillock between Pabanda and Charlapalli villages. Since Rana was only on his second solo flight, the IAF is not ruling out the possibility of inexperience clubbed with technical failure.

Today’s was the tenth HPT-32 crash since 1989. While the aircraft’s maker, HAL, feels the two-decade-old HPT-32 has another eight-10 years of life, it has already proposed a new first-rung trainer for the IAF, likely to be a turboprop platform, company chairman Ashok Baweja said. The HTT-34, a turboprop version of the HPT-32, developed in 1984, was stalled at the prototype stage, following lukewarm reaction from customers.

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The last accident, involving an HPT-32, was in October 2004, from Dundigul-based AFA, which operates about 55 Deepak trainers and 16 Kirans. Pilots move onto Kirans or TS-11 Iskras for intermediate jet training after they complete training hours on the Deepak.

In 2002, a year in which three Deepak trainers went down, the IAF had told HAL, manufacturers of the Deepak trainer, that it was too risky to let trainee pilots fly the aircraft solo.