Tejas will be judged by its Fleet and Service to India’s Security, not by one tragic incident: Experts

By R Anil Kumar

Despite a recent crash, supporters of the aircraft point to its overall strong safety record of thousands of sorties over two decades and its strategic importance in modernizing the Indian Air Force’s capabilities and fostering self-reliance in defence technology.

Contribution to National Security:

The Tejas fighter is a 4.5 generation, all-weather, multi-role aircraft designed for missions including offensive support, ground attack, and maritime operations. Its development is crucial for India’s goal of becoming self-reliant in defence technology, as it helps replace aging fleets and maintain a technological edge.

Context of a Single Incident: The crash at the Dubai Air Show, though tragic, is considered to be a single event in the history of a program that has completed thousands of hours of flight time with an otherwise clean safety record. The focus on this one incident, especially in international eyes, can overshadow the aircraft’s broader performance and contribution.

Broader Safety and Production Record: The Tejas has been cited as having a strong safety record in global aviation, with the recent crash being only its second incident in 24 years. Furthermore, efforts have been made to improve production, with initiatives to increase the number of aircraft built annually and boost indigenous manufacturing capabilities.

Impact of the Incident: The high-visibility nature of the accident, particularly in an international event like the Dubai Air Show, can impact perception and potentially create diplomatic pressure or doubt among prospective buyers. However, the argument is that the long-term strategic value of the Tejas program to India’s security and self-sufficiency should be the primary measure of its worth.

How to look at the Tejas crash in Dubai without falling for the noise?

Most importantly it has a clean safety record. On that last count the Tejas has actually been one of the better stories in global aviation.

Tejas still has one of the cleanest safety records in its class, and that is the point worth remembering amid all the noise.

The crash of the Tejas at the Dubai Air Show is one of those moments when a tragedy becomes instantly global, amplified not just by the cameras pointing at it but by the politics surrounding it. Everyone saw the fireball. Everyone saw the plume of smoke against the desert sky. And yet, what most people did not see or did not want to see was the context.

Air-show flying is inherently dangerous. Demonstration routines are pushed to their extremes precisely because they are meant to impress and showcase the jet’s agility. In this case the early evidence already points towards something painfully simple. It was a negative-G manoeuvre flown too low, and the aircraft never had the altitude to recover. That is the brutal physics of it.

Low-altitude negative-G manoeuvres offer little forgiveness. The moment the jet rolls out and the wings level, the vertical rate of descent is already too high. From that point even the best pilot in the world has only seconds, sometimes fractions of seconds. The Tejas hits the ground before an ejection sequence can even begin.

This was not a systems failure or a design flaw or a structural collapse. This was the razor’s edge of air-show flying, and this time the edge won.

Nuance is always the first casualty. Even before the smoke cleared, the usual ecosystem of Pakistani and Chinese social media “defence experts” began doing what they always do, which is to turn a tragedy into a talking point.

The same recycled narratives came out again. They claimed India’s aircraft are unsafe, that Indian pilots are poorly trained, that Indian fighters cannot be trusted. This is the same ecosystem that once spread fantastical claims about the Rafale to hype up Chinese platforms, platforms that went on to fail spectacularly during Op Sindoor when measured against their own advertised performance.

They have jumped on this moment with predictable glee.

The worst part is that some people fall for it because they assume air-show crashes are rare in the modern era. They are not. They happen far more often than the propaganda artists would like you to remember.

The Chinese, who now lecture the world from behind anonymous accounts and state-controlled publications, have themselves lost frontline combat jets during demonstrations. A JH-7 Flying Leopard went down during the 2011 Shaanxi show. A J-10S of their Ba Yi aerobatics team crashed during practice in 2016.

The United States, which is widely regarded as the global benchmark for aviation safety, has also seen Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornets and Thunderbirds F-16Cs lost during high-G display routines. Pilots have blacked out under extreme loads. One Thunderbird pilot ejected a split second before his F-16 hit the ground during a miscalculated Split-S in 2003.

The truth is that even well-funded and heavily trained aerobatic teams, flying highly reliable aircraft, face risk every time they operate at high angles of attack, rapid roll rates or aggressive manoeuvre schedules demanded at air displays.

None of this trivialises what happened in Dubai. An Indian military aviator trained to the highest standards lost his life in the most public of settings. It is a gut punch for the Air Force and a moment of profound grief for the squadron, the engineers who maintain the jets, the programme teams at HAL and the entire community around Tejas.

But if we refuse to look at it honestly, we hand over the narrative to people who have no interest in honesty.

There is now a real-world consequence. This crash will affect the Tejas export prospects, and we should not pretend otherwise.

For years India has positioned the Tejas as a compelling alternative for countries that do not want to depend on Western suppliers and do not want to surrender their sovereignty to Beijing. The sales pitch has always been clear. Tejas is modern, reliable and relatively affordable. It has strong avionics and a clear upgrade path.

Most importantly it has a clean safety record. On that last count the Tejas has actually been one of the better stories in global aviation. The aircraft has completed thousands of sorties across two decades and had suffered only one crash. The second has now come in Dubai in the middle of an extreme manoeuvre, exactly the sort of scenario in which many jets from many countries have been lost.

Try explaining statistical safety to a defence minister in a small nation who is now watching a viral video of a Tejas hitting the ground at an international event. Defence purchases are not always made on logic. They are made on perception and pressure and political comfort. This crash gives rivals, especially China, every incentive to whisper doubts into the ears of prospective buyers.

Some countries may step back for a while. Some may decide to wait for the inquiry report. Some may simply prefer to avoid the heat of taking a decision tied to a jet that has just suffered a high-visibility accident.

That is the unfortunate reality of arms diplomacy. Optics matter almost as much as engineering.

But this must not become a self-fulfilling prophecy inside India. The Tejas is still an aircraft with one of the best safety records in its class. It is a platform that has matured steadily, that has integrated smoothly into IAF operations and that has won the trust of the pilots who fly it.

The Dubai crash does not erase the thousands of trouble-free sorties before it. It does not invalidate the capabilities the programme has demonstrated across multiple variants and upgrades.

On the other hand, the safety records of Chinese and Pakistani platforms is publicly known, and it hardly inspires confidence. The JF-17 has seen multiple crashes, and several Chinese-origin types in service abroad have struggled with recurring technical and reliability issues.

If anything, this is the moment to double down, not in defensive chest-thumping but in transparency. The inquiry should do its work. The findings should be released. Any weaknesses in procedures, display envelopes, training profiles or safety buffers should be fixed. And the aircraft should continue flying.

The worst thing India can do now is hesitate or allow a single tragic incident to distort the trajectory of a programme that represents decades of national effort.

There will be noise in the coming days. There will be misinformation. There will be coordinated attempts to weaponise a pilot’s death in order to undermine India’s aerospace ambitions.

The truth is much simpler and far more grounded. Air-show flying is unforgiving. Pilots are human. Machines have limits. Sometimes those limits collide with physics and leave no room for recovery.