Continued:
The Air Force also maintains that the overall figures do not tally badly with the superpower air forces. If there were 21 category-I accidents in the IAF in 2001-02, the US Air Force had 35 of what they call Class-A accidents. Against IAF's eight fatalities, USAF had 22 in the same period.

Vintage of a plane has nothing to do with its safety. USAF's B-52s have been flying for the last 45 years, and the plane has not even been upgraded. "Today the MiG-21 is the only multirole plane with the IAF," said an officer. "We used them as interceptors in 1965, for close combat in 1971, and today as the multirole plane." The newer Mirages are also multirole, but there are just two squadrons of them.

IAF brass say that they have grounded unserviceable planes, like the MiG-21FL. This is the oldest version, most of them built between 1966 and 1973. Their airframes had a calendar life of 3300 hours or 40 years, and their engines (R-11) 1600 hours. Type-96, built between 1970 and 1981, still have a lot of bite left in them since their airframes are to last 3000 hours in 35 years, and their engines (R-13) 1500 hours.

The Type-75, better known as Bis and built between 1977 and 1987, have an airframe calendar life of 3000 hours in 35 years and engine (R-25) life of 1200 hours. About 160 to 250 of each variety have been built by Hindustan Aeronautics and supplied to the IAF. The Bis, the oldest of which is 26 years and the newest 16 years, still has many years to go and is being upgraded. "As chief of air staff, even I don't have the authority to allow any aircraft to be flown more than the stipulated life," said Krishnaswamy.

There are many in the services who believe that the campaign against MiG-21 began in the mid-1990s after the IAF decided to upgrade 125 of the Bis variety, and use them till at least 2015 when light combat aircraft Tejas would be available in bulk from Hindustan Aeronautics. This decision poured cold water on the plans of many foreign plane-makers to sell multirole planes in bulk to India. "We should not take decisions under pressure, we may end up paying more money," said an officer who suspects that the British hiked the price of Hawk when the IAF put pressure on the ministry to get the AJT.

The only time the Air Force had doubts about the reliability of the MiG-21 was when there were two unprecedented incidents of flame-out in the R-25 engine of the otherwise reliable MiG-21 Bis. This happened last year, and all the un-upgraded Bis planes, except those needed for operations in the stand-off with Pakistan, were grounded and checked before being allowed to fly again.

IAF officers privately admit that lack of spare parts had been a major cause of accidents, especially in the mid-1990s. The MiG-21s are no longer built in Russia and when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a major problem. It has more or less been solved by partly indigenising the unavailable spares, and by scouting the world market. Air officers recall how they spotted a critical valve in the Dubai godown of a Singapore vendor who had collected all the nuts, bolts, valves and caskets from the Soviet factories and was selling them at 50 to 100 times the price of the original.

The latest on the MiG front is that the IAF had bought a few second-hand MiG-21 trainers from Kyrgystan and Ukraine, one of which crashed earlier this month in Kashmir. The IAF main-tains that the planes were bought as there was a shortage of trainer versions. And, as an officer put it, "You don't buy Mirages to train MiG pilots."