Tragedy struck the Indian Air Force again on Saturday morning. A Soviet-origin Antonov AN-32 transport aircraft crumpled and caught fire while attempting an emergency landing at the Rowriah airbase in Jorhat, Assam. Five military personnel died in the wreckage. One managed to make it out alive—the co-pilot, who is currently fighting for recovery at a military medical facility.
The names of the dead hit hard: Squadron Leader Prashant Singh, Flight Lieutenant Shubham Kumar, Sergeant Jitendra Sharma, Agniveervayu Khemaram Kumawat, and Agniveervayu Danish Alam. They made the supreme sacrifice during what should have been a routine logistics flight.
But let's stop sugarcoating these repeating military tragedies. We don't just have a tragic accident here. We have a systemic, glaring issue with aging technical workhorses operating in the unforgiving geography of India’s Northeast. When an aircraft takes off, encounters a mechanical glitch, turns right back around, and explodes off the runway, it's a sign that something is fundamentally broken.
The Fatal Timeline at Rowriah Air Base
The flight took off under normal conditions on Saturday morning on a standard cargo and supply run. It didn't take long for things to go wrong. Shortly after clearing the runway, the crew encountered an unspecified technical fault.
Standard operating procedure dictated an immediate return to the Jorhat airbase. But as the twin-engine turboprop came in for its emergency landing around 10:00 AM, the aircraft failed to hold the airstrip. It skidded violently off the tarmac, suffered a structural failure, and exploded. Eyewitnesses near the base perimeter reported a massive blast followed by a column of thick black smoke rising over the airfield.
Emergency crews flooded the site with foam and water to suppress the flames, but for five men inside, the impact and subsequent fire left no chance of survival. The entire airbase was locked down by senior officials as recovery teams worked through the debris.
The Problem with the Aging AN-32 Fleet
The IAF operates around 100 Antonov AN-32 aircraft. This Soviet-designed airframe has been the absolute backbone of Indian military logistics for four decades. It’s easy to see why the military loves them on paper. They have high-mounted engines designed to keep debris out of the intakes, they handle hot and high-altitude runways like a dream, and they can land on dirt strips that would rip a modern commercial jet apart.
But airframes don't last forever. Metal fatigue, obsolescence of replacement parts, and decades of red-lining engines through mountainous terrain take an undeniable toll. The Jorhat incident isn't an isolated anomaly. It is part of a dark, recurring ledger.
- June 2019: An AN-32 took off from this exact same Jorhat airbase heading for Mechuka in Arunachal Pradesh. It slammed into a mountain side, killing 13 personnel.
- July 2016: Another AN-32 vanished entirely over the Bay of Bengal with 29 people on board. Deep-sea debris wasn't even positively identified until 2024.
The IAF has been systematically upgrading these planes to the AN-32RE standard, featuring modern avionics and improved engines. But you can only patch up a 1970s design so many times before physics catches up with you.
A Dangerous Pattern in Assam Skies
We also have to talk about the location. The Northeast frontier is a logistical nightmare. The weather turns on a dime, the terrain is merciless, and the airbases are often squeezed into tight valleys or unpredictable microclimates.
This is the second major military aviation disaster in Assam in just over three months. Back on March 6, a front-line Sukhoi Su-30MKI fighter jet crashed in the rugged hills of Karbi Anglong after taking off from—you guessed it—Jorhat. That crash killed Squadron Leader Anuj and Flight Lieutenant Purvesh Duragkar.
Losing high-tech fighters is bad enough. Losing rugged cargo haulers during routine airfield landings points to a deeper strain on operational maintenance, turnaround times, and component reliability.
What Needs to Happen Beyond the Court of Inquiry
The Air Force did what it always does: it ordered a formal Court of Inquiry to pinpoint the exact technical issue. That is necessary, but it shouldn't stop there.
First, the defense ministry needs to stop dragging its feet on replacing the transport fleet. While the induction of the Airbus C-295 is a massive step forward, the transition is moving too slowly to protect crews flying the oldest airframes today. The AN-32 fleet needs an immediate, aggressive audit. Airframes showing even minor signs of structural stress or chronic component failures must be grounded permanently, regardless of the logistical shortfall it creates.
Second, the structural realities of operating from bases like Jorhat need re-evaluation. Emergency response protocols, runway safety margins, and local weather-monitoring gear must match the high-risk nature of these aging platforms.
The co-pilot surviving gives investigators a direct eyewitness account of what went wrong in the cockpit before the skid. We owe it to the five airmen who didn't make it out to ensure their deaths force a hard, unblinking look at the systems keeping these older planes in the air. This cannot just be filed away as another routine operational risk.
