The Minister of Defense officially announced an urgent decision that was taken by the authorities, and which applies to all of Romania, and this is due to the fact that in recent years there have been several accidents involving MiG 21 Lancer planes, thus that the flight right for the devices has been suspended.
The Minister of Defense says that the suspension is, for now, a temporary one, until an analysis will be carried out to determine if they are safe enough to be left in operation, but Romania can continue to do air policing and without them.
"We are currently doing an analysis, the Chief of Staff of the Army presented me with a very serious strategy, because we are thinking first of all about the safety of the aeronautical personnel. I want to say that, first of all, I think as a minister that I cannot accept that elite pilots live these dramas and because the endowment is one that is over 40 years old.
We need to equip ourselves with modern technology, and this is our priority. We are not suspending them definitively, because the MiG 21 Lancers would never have taken off if it had been found that they do not meet all the technical parameters of this moment, but it is understandable that they are very old in service, the incidence of accidents has increased.
They are currently in reserve, we also have many professionals who are trained in this field, but are currently suspended from flying. We don't know what types of missions they will return to unless we do a very serious analysis. The suspension is of course related to the incident of the crashed plane last month, because it is the last in a long series.
In a short time we will give a definitive report, I have seen a preliminary report, for sure it was a competition of factors given by the meteorological situation and the technical situation, we will discuss at that time, but for now what we see happened in this long series of accidents puts us in the situation to make this decision.
This decision, I want to clarify, does not jeopardize our defense and air police capacity on NATO's eastern flank. No army in the world can afford to endanger people's lives, man is more important than an aircraft."
