India does not agree with reports of Russian press about cause of MIG-21 planes' crashes

The Hindustan Aeronautics, Ltd.(HAL) state enterprise has refuted the reports of the Russian press that the crashes of MIG-21 fighters have been caused by the bad quality of the spare parts which were delivered to the HAL. As the RIA Novosti correspondent reports, the HAL statement was issued by the PTI News Agency. According to some Russian mass media, the MIG aircraft-building concern will possibly ask the Indian Air Force to send it the serial numbers of the spare parts in the crashed MIG-21 fighters which were used as training planes. The Russian side suspects that these spare parts were not delivered from Russia, but the HAL did not have the right to produce its own spare parts for these fighters. As the Indian press reports, the MIG-21 was one of the best models of the fighters and the most wide-spread in the world at the end of the 1980s. More than 7,000 these fighters were in service in thirty-seven countries. They took part in many wars from Angola to Egypt and from Iraq to Vietnam. In the opinion of the Indian experts, the cause of the fighters' incidents was unsatisfactory servicing in respective Air Forces, not defects of the planes themselves. In India, in the past forty years different variants of the MIG-21 fighters were the main combat power of the Air Force. Today, too, they account for nearly half of the combat-ready squadrons. The Indian Air Force has in service five different types of the MIG-21 fighters, as well as MIG-27, MIG-29 and MIG-25R planes.