“Pilot has been rescued safely. The MiG crashed into a house. Two people have died. Three people have been injured,” police officer Sudhir Chaudhary told AFP after the crash in the western state of Rajasthan.

The Indian Air Force confirmed the incident in a tweet. The aircraft crashed near Suratgarh during a routine training sortie on Monday morning.

An inquiry has been constituted to ascertain the cause of the accident, it said.

Russian-made MiG-21 jets first entered Indian service in the 1960s and for decades served as the backbone of the country’s air force.

Numerous crashes in the past few decades, however, have led to the planes being dubbed “flying coffins” because of their poor safety record.

The crash comes days after an Indian Army helicopter with two pilots and a technician crashed in a forest area of Kishtwar district of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir.

Last year, two pilots were killed after a twin-seater MiG-21 aircraft crashed in Barmer district of Rajasthan.