On Thursday, February 6, 2025, a twin-seater Mirage-2000 fighter aircraft of the Indian Air Force (IAF) crashed near Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh during a routine training sortie. The IAF reported that the crash occurred due to a system malfunction. Both pilots ejected safely.

The crash occurred near Shivpuri, specifically near Sunari Chowki in Narwar Tehsil. The incident took place around 2:30 pm, shortly after the plane took off from the Maharajpura airbase in Gwalior.

Both pilots ejected safely and were taken to a hospital in an IAF chopper.

A Court of Inquiry has been ordered by the IAF to ascertain the cause of the accident.

Mirage-2000, the multirole fighter jet was built by France's Dassault Aviation, with its first flight in 1978. The French Air Force inducted it in 1984, and 600 Mirage-2000s were produced, with 50% exported to eight countries, including India. There is also a single-seater version of this aircraft.

The IAF has approximately 50 Mirage-2000s in service, and the aircraft is considered highly reliable. It saw action in the Kargil war, where it accurately dropped laser-guided bombs. The IAF also used it to bomb a terrorist camp in Balakot, Pakistan, in February 2019.

Two years prior to this incident, the IAF lost two fighter planes, a Sukhoi-30 and a Mirage-2000, along with a combat pilot, in a mid-air collision in Madhya Pradesh.

A Parliamentary standing committee on defence presented a report in Lok Sabha last December, listing reasons for 34 air crashes between 2017 and 2022, including human error, technical defects, foreign object damage, and bird strikes.

PTI