Continued:
He said the negative coverage has even affected the marriage prospects of young pilots who fly these single-engine fighters.
"We are angered. It is terrible. It is a weapon of war. It is a thoroughbred horse," Krishnaswamy said, adding that a high level of precision and concentration is required to fly MiGs. It cannot be operated on auto-pilot like modern day passenger jets, which even have 'charming airhostesses who can fly'.
He said the IAF is devising a strategy that involves recruiting officers from the best campuses in the country.
The air force chief said the acquisition of Advanced Jet Trainers has been delayed 'despite all our efforts'. 
The IAF recently tested the L159B, a Czech AJT with US components that has now entered the fray with the British Hawk.
The entry of L159B has further delayed the AJT's acquisition, which has deeply divided the political class and angered the IAF.
There is a bitter and costly war that is delaying, with drastic results, the over $2 billion contract. The fight over the AJT contract doesn't seem to be ending even though since the AJTs acquisition process was initiated in the mid-80s, the IAF has lost over 50 of its finest fighter pilots.
the Air Force still maintains that there is little wrong with the plane which precise-bombed the governor's house in Dhakka forcing him to surrender, chased and force-landed Peter Bleach's arms-dropping Antonov, and shot down the spying Pakistani Atlantique over Kutch. But when the Atlantique-killer himself, Squadron Leader P.K Bundela, crashed with his MiG-21 in April 2002 following an engine flame-out and died later, the debate got an emotional twist.

That is what the Air Force doesn't want. As a perturbed Krishnaswamy said recently, "You can't just retire planes; it is not as simple." To him, asking MiG-21s to be grounded because more of them have crashed is like asking Marutis to be taken off the roads because more Marutis, more of which are there on Indian roads than all other cars, have met with accidents.

The major reason for MiG-21s getting a bad name, according to the Air Force, is that there are more of them. As an operations officer explained, there are four times more fighter planes in the Indian skies than commercial planes at any given time, and about three quarters of them are MiG-21s. So much so that even a plane that disappears because of bad weather-as did the one with Squadron Leader T.J.A. Khan and Flying Officer D. Dahiya near Tezpur in April last year-gets added to the MiG-21 statistics. "Three out of every five fighter planes getting into bad weather is a MiG-21," said Krishnaswamy.

There are hundreds of MiG-21s in the Air Force inventory (more than 600 were built and supplied to IAF), flying 54,100 sorties a year (last five years' average), against a handful of squadrons of Mirages or Jaguars or MiG-29s. "A MiG-21 pilot flies at least 20 times a month, and he is not crashing or killing people," said Krishnaswamy. If MiG-21s had seven category-I accidents (the most serious) in the 54,100 sorties, all other fighter planes in IAF inventory also had seven category-I crashes in almost half as many (23,200) sorties.

Wrong comparisons, say IAF officers, are being made with other planes like Jaguar or Mirage or MiG-29. The 98 MiG-21 accidents that occurred in the last 10 years took place in 5,53,000 sorties. "The MiG-21 is constantly flying in training sorties or patrolling," said an official. "Not the Jaguar which is a dedicated strike plane (bomber). You are not bombing in peacetime, but air patrol and training is a 24-hour, 365-day affair."

Yet there have been three category-I accidents involving Jaguar since April 2000, forcing the IAF to seek information from the Royal Air Force on its accidents, and get the plane's basic design from British Aerospace. There were more fatalities caused by technical fault in the Gnat Mark-I. "No design problem has caused any MiG-21 crash," said Krishnaswamy.

Going by accident-sortie ratio, the MiG-23 has been less safe than the MiG-21. Both MiG-23 and MiG-27 are being overhauled and partly upgraded by the Air Force at Nashik. Krishnaswamy admits that some engine-related problems have been encountered in some of the MiG-23s and MiG-27s, though there has been no problem with their airframes.

The main reason for MiG-21 accidents, including the one that killed Gadgil, according to the Air Force, is pilot error. If 14 of pilot-error accidents were caused by training-related human error in the last five years, environment-related errors led to four crashes, and take-off or landing time errors caused seven. Training-period accidents can be reduced only with the induction of an advanced jet trainer (AJT) which the IAF has been demanding since 1985 and is yet to get.

In the absence of an AJT, pilots who have been trained on Kirans which take off at 200 kilometres per hour are next put into MiG-21s which have a take-off speed of 340 kmph. (An AJT falls in between with 245 kmph, thus acting as a bridge between the two.) The gravity pull then goes up to 9G, whereas the human body can tolerate only 4 to 5G. The anti-gravity suit takes care of 1G, but the rest has to be overcome through constant training. As Air Marshal S.K. Dham, director-general medical services (air), said recently, "All pilots face disorientation and some may have gravity-related loss of consciousness."