The 17 squadron, which operated from Bhatinda air base, was disbanded in 2016 after the IAF started gradual phasing out of Russian-origin MIG-21 jets. It was formed in 1951 and initially flew de Havilland Vampire F Mk 52 fighters.
'Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) of the ill-fated aircraft have been retrieved. AAIB (Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau) is conducting investigations,' Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri tweeted, as fresh questions were raised on the safety parameters of the runway.
Squadron Leader D Pankaj and Flight Lieutenant S Achudev could not initiate ejection before the crash.
Six Rafale trainer aircraft will carry RB series tail numbers which stand for Air Chief Marshal R K S Bhadauria, the current Chief of Air Staff who played a key role as lead negotiator for the mega deal.
Dhanoa also hoped that the matter will be laid to rest saying that raking up such issues to get political gains, putting the interest of armed forces behind is not right.
According to IAF sources, both the pilots were found in their flying seat, which indicated that they did not get time to eject.
Divers on Tuesday retrieved the cockpit voice recorder and may have located the fuselage of the crashed AirAsia jet in the Java Sea as experts will now use data from the two crucial black box devices to determine the sequence of events that brought the flight down. The cockpit voice recorder, that possesses the last two hours of conversation between the pilots and with air traffic controllers, was found close to where the flight data recorder was recovered from the bottom of the choppy waters on Monday.
The Indian Air Force had on Thursday said all 13 people on board the aircraft have died.
About 350 Boeing 737 Max 8 are currently in service with airlines around the world, with thousands more on order. Boeing insists it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies.
Members of the search operation are yet to reach the spot.
About 350 Boeing 737 Max 8 are currently in service with airlines around the world, with thousands more on order. Boeing insists it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies.
The 31-year-old captain has 6,000 flight hours and the co-pilot more than 5,000 flight hours, the statement said.
The John Lethbridge, a privately owned deep-sea survey and recovery vehicle, is now headed to Alexandria to hand over the remains to prosecution and forensic authorities in the presence of members of the investigation committee.
On Thursday, the cockpit voice recorder for EgyptAir Flight 804 was found in a damaged condition, an Egyptian investigative committee said after the wreckage of the ill-fated plane was recovered on Wednesday.
New reports have suggested that the captain of the Germanwings plane had yelled at the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz to open the door of the cockpit as he tried to use a crowbar to force his way into the cockpit during the horrific descent.
The aircraft flew out from the airbase in the French port city of Bordeaux and will cover a distance of nearly 7,000 km with air-to-air refuelling and a single stop in the United Arab Emirates before arriving at Ambala airbase on Wednesday, officials said.
Moments before Los Angeles basketball great Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter and the seven others perished in a helicopter crash, the pilot had tried to climb out of layer of clouds, but the aircraft then banked sharply and lurched toward the ground. Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) estimated Bryant's luxury passenger helicopter hit the ground at a speed of more than 2,000 feet (610 m) per minute.
The acoustic pingers on the missing Malaysia Airlines plane's two black boxes were due for overhauls and battery replacements in 2012 but were never returned to their manufacturer, according to a media report.
The black box of the C-130J transport aircraft that crashed near Gwalior on Friday has suffered damage and the Indian Air Force has sent it to the United States to seek the assistance of its manufacturer Lockheed Martin in decoding the data, officials said on Sunday.
Rescuers hunting for the crashed AirAsia plane on Friday detected 'pings' believed to be from its crucial black box, a top Indonesian official said, raising hopes of unravelling the mystery of the deadly crash.
Egypt President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday said a submarine was deployed to locate the black boxes of doomed EgyptAir plane.
The PIA plane PK-661 with 48 people, including famous pop singer-turned-Islamic preacher Junaid Jamshed, his wife and Deputy Commissioner Chitral Osama Warraich, on board crashed on Wednesday in Saddha Batolni village near Havelian while en route to Islamabad from Chitral in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
Singh received the aircraft at the Rafale fighter jet handing-over ceremony at Merignac in the presence of French Minister of Armed Forces Florence Parly. Members of the top military brass of France as well as senior officials of Dassault Aviation, the makers of Rafale, were also present at the ceremony.
Fourteen years in the making and a incessant reminder of the horrors of the past, Flight 93 National Memorial, which opened on Thursday, is an interactive centre that employs photographs, video recordings, artefacts and graphic displays to tell the story of the doomed United Airlines Flight 93, the only jetliner among the four commandeered by terrorists that failed to reach its intended target on September 11, 2001.
Autonomous underwater vehicle Bluefin 21, a US Navy probe equipped with side-scan sonar, has focused the search on an area in the southern Indian Ocean where four acoustic signals were detected that led authorities to believe that the plane's black box may be located there.
Doomed AirAsia jet's fuselage was found on Wednesday raising hopes of retrieving the remaining bodies of the 162 people killed in the tragedy, as investigators downloaded the contents of black box recorders and were likely to crack the crash's mystery soon.
Search teams hunting for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane have heard the signals again that could be consistent with those emitted by aircraft "black box", even as investigators were racing against time to locate the flight data recorders before its beacons fall silent.
The arduous hunt for the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on Friday entered a new phase with two hi-tech ships scouring a large area in the Indian Ocean for the black box of the jet before pings from it fall silent.
Disciplinary action is being taken against two officers in the shooting down of the chopper.
A mini-submarine deployed to find the crashed Malaysian jet has touched record depths in the Indian Ocean beyond its operating limits and embarked on a fifth mission on Friday, with still no sign of the plane's wreckage.
Shark's eye view! Instruments strapped onto and ingested by sharks have provided novel insights into how one of the most feared and least understood ocean predator swims, eats and lives, scientists say.
The story behind the horrific crash of the Lufthansa's Germanwings airbus that claimed the lives of 150 people onboard could take some more time to unravel.
The battery of the locator beacon of the flight data recorder of the doomed Malaysian plane MH370 had expired over a year before it mysteriously disappeared over the Indian Ocean, an interim report said on Sunday but did not indicate any unusual behaviour by the crew.
French air investigators are examining one of the black boxes of the doomed Germanwings plane to find out why the aircraft crashed into a mountain in the French Alps, killing the 150 people on board.
Once searchers hunting for the crashed Malaysian jet decide to shift from listening for the acoustic signals from the black boxes from the floor of the Indian Ocean to poring over its treacherous terrain, they will have to draw from a whole new set of tools, experts say.
The deal which is worth 7.87-billion (Rs 58,363 crore) comes with a saving of nearly 750 million (Rs 5,611 crore).
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