08 December,2009 08:49 AM IST | | Chandran Iyer
A week after being grounded, supersonic jets take to the sky again
A fortnight ago, all eyes were on the historic flight that took President Pratibha Patil on a 30-minute sortie and into history books as the first female President to fly a fighter jet. But soon after a tragic Sukhoi MKI jet in Rajasthan on November 30, the entire fleet was grounded.
However, after making all the necessary checks and following safety procedure, the fleet has been given the signal to soar back into the sky. The first set of jets took to the skyu00a0 from the Lohegaon airbase yesterday.
Routine inspection
"The aircraft were airborne on Monday after they were thoroughly checked to ascertain that all systems were working normally and there were no glitches in the machinery," a spokesperson from the Southwest Command of the Air Force told MiD DAY.
The inspection included functioning of all the panels, fuel lines, and other machineries of the aircraft. The spokesperson added that these routine checks were done to ascertain that there was nothing wrong in the
aircraft.
The aircraft, which crashed on November 30, was on a routine training sortie and its pilots, Wing Commander Shrivastav and Flight Lieutenant Arora, had bailed out to safety before the mishap. In the previous Sukhoi crash on April 30 this year, the IAF had lost a pilot and an error in its fly-by-wire system was said to be the cause of that mishap.
Colonel (retd) Ranjit Singh Dev, a Shaurya Chakra awardee with 8,000 hours of flying experience, said, "It's a normal practice in defence forces to ground the entire fleet of aircraft even if one its aircraft meets with an accident."
He added, "The engineers carry out preliminary inspection and then intimate the manufacturer who then suggests the inspection, whichu00a0 needs to be carried out. After that, a court inquiry is held to find out the exact cause of the mishap." Currently, India is operating five squadrons of the Russian-built fighter aircraft, with three stationed at Lohegaon and two in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh.
Each squadron operates 18-20 aircrafts. All the aircrafts were grounded for inspection.
