Faltering Flight

The tragic death of Wing Commander Namansh Syal during an aerial display in Dubai has pierced the celebratory haze around India’s rising aerospace ambitions. The Tejas Light Combat Aircraft, meant to headline India’s growing prowess and self-reliance, instead nose-dived into the ground during a negative-G turn. A grief-stricken Indian Air Force (IAF) and a shocked nation now face questions that go beyond a single aircraft or accident.

While the IAF has launched an investigation, the symbolic damage is immediate. For a country keen to advertise indigenous capability, the incident could hardly have come at a worse moment. With 38 aircraft in service, nearly 200 more on order, and a growing role in India’s future fighter fleet, the Tejas had become a poster child of self-reliance. The Dubai crash has now dimmed that glow, even if temporarily.

Airshows, by design, flirt with risk. They are spectacles meant to compress an aircraft’s capability into minutes of daring manoeuvres. Even the best training cannot eliminate the fact that these displays operate on the razor’s edge of performance envelopes. History is full of grim reminders: the Mirage 2000 crash during Air Force Day rehearsals in 1989; the 2019 Surya Kiran mid-air collision; the Polish F-16 that crashed during a barrel roll this August; and the Spanish EF-18 that nearly flew into a beachside crowd after a momentary loss of control. That the Dubai accident occurred in such a setting is therefore tragic, but not unprecedented. What distinguishes this incident is the aircraft involved. The Tejas project has been haunted by delays, cost escalations and shifting requirements since its inception in the early 1980s. The aircraft finally entered service only in the 2010s, and fresh concerns were raised recently over delayed engine supplies for the upgraded Mk-1A variant. Critics of India’s defence R&D ecosystem will find easy ammunition in these events.

And yet, the aircraft itself deserves a clearer appraisal. By global standards, the Tejas has an exceptional safety record. It suffered no hull loss during development which is a rarity for a single-engine fighter and only one catastrophic failure since induction prior to Dubai, both circumstances in which pilots survived through ejection. In comparison, Pakistan’s JF-17 has endured multiple crashes, Sweden’s Gripen lost several prototypes to fly-by-wire glitches, and France’s Mirage family encountered repeated developmental accidents. Tejas’s delta-wing design and quadruple-redundant flight control system remain robust and admired by pilots who fly it.

India’s aviation missteps lie not in engineering talent, but in systemic underinvestment in research and a long history of state-led programmes that promised more than they could deliver. In 1961 India flew Asia’s first modern jet combat aircraft, the HF-24 Marut, only to abandon the momentum that could have made it an aviation power decades before China. The Dubai crash should not derail India’s indigenous aviation drive. Instead, this is the moment to confront structural weaknesses. India’s aerospace destiny lies not in retreating from risk, but in reforming the institutions that shape it.