An Indian Tejas fighter jet crashed in a ball of fire in front of horrified spectators during an aerial display at the Dubai Airshow yesterday, and the Indian Air Force said it was setting up a court of inquiry to investigate the cause.
Video from the site showed black smoke rising behind a fenced airstrip. Dubai’s government shared a photograph of firefighting teams dousing smouldering wreckage.
Jignesh Variya, 46, who was attending the show with his family, told Reuters the fighter jet had been flying for no more than eight or nine minutes and completed two to three laps when it went into a nose-dive, before flattening out but continuing to lose altitude and crashing at around 2.15pm (1015 GMT).
“I could see three different fireballs when it collided with the ground,” he said. “Everybody in the crowd stood up there on their feet, and then maybe in around 30 seconds, the emergency vehicles rushed over to the location at the crash site.”
It was the second known crash of the single-engine 4.5-generation fighter jet. The first crash was during an exercise in India in 2024.
The crash happened during the last day of the airshow, the Middle East’s largest aviation event, which started on Monday. Flying had resumed later yesterday, witnesses said, with jets back in the sky above the show site.
“A court of inquiry is being constituted to ascertain the cause of the accident,” the Indian Air Force said in a statement. It confirmed the sole pilot had been killed. The Indian embassy said it was in touch with UAE authorities. Experts stressed it was too early to say what caused the crash.
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