Dispelling myths about 'flying coffin' MiG 21

If you too believe that MiG 21s are nothing but ‘widow-makers’, meet air commodore Surendra Singh Tyagi, who flew not only the controversial Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) 21the most, but also MiG 23, 27 & 29, Jaguar and Canberra and survived to tell his hair-raising tales.

Recalling an incident from October 1978, he said how a technical fault made his plane drop from the air at close to 400 km/hour and he had to crash land. “It immediately occurred to me that to reduce the impact and survive, I had to turn it to the side soon as I hit the ground. I did just that and here I am talking about it today! In fact, I flew more after this incident, than before it,” Tyagi said.

To his credit Tyagi made 6,316 sorties aboard the MiG 21, popularly dubbed the ‘flying coffin’. Looking back at his long, illustrious and decorated career spanning over 33 years as an Indian Air Force (IAF) pilot, Tyagi claims he has cheated death for 4,003 of the 8,000 total flight hours he has logged.

To translate these flight hours into days, Tyagi flew 333 days in total, of which nearly 167 days were spent flying the MiG! The airman spent the maximum flight hours on the particular aircraft, ever, and long enough to create a record, before he hung his boots as station commander of the IAF base at Jamnagar in 1999.

Tyagi’s achievement was acknowledged by the global head of operations for MiG, Russia. The felicitation took place on April 20, when the IAF was celebrating 50 years of the MiG 21 aircraft’s service to the nation.

“I would rather live and serve my country, than die and leave my service to the nation incomplete. Those who die are called martyrs, but I believe that those who brave the odds deserve similar respect too,” said Tyagi, who took 28 postings including the fighter squadrons at Bareli and Jodhpur as well as station commander at Naliya, Kutch.

Dispelled myths about MiG 21 being ‘flying coffins’, he said the ‘economies of scale’ worked against the MiG, lending it the disrepute. “In IAF, we gauge safety of a fighter aircraft based on accident rate, which is calculated in terms of accidents per 10,000 flying hours. This rate, at under 0.7 for the most current MiG – the Bison – is no longer alarming as compared with average accident rate for all aircraft deployed by the air force,” he said.

“Earlier, MiG used to comprise nearly 65% of IAF fleet and two of three planes flown are MiGs. Therefore, it registered more crashes than others. Also, most of them were used as training aircraft, in which the chances of human error are higher,” he explained.

Post retirement, Tyagi heads the Jamnagar chapter of Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach) as well as being regional head of Rashtriya Sainik Sanstha.