AHMEDABAD – An Indian Air Force pilot was killed Tuesday after his fighterjet crashed near the country’s border with Pakistan, officials said.

Sanjay Chauhan was on a routine training mission in the remote Kutch desertregion of Gujarat state when he crashed, air force officials said.

“The pilot died in the crash and we have ordered an inquiry in theaccident,” an IAF official told AFP.

It was not immediately clear what caused the single-seat Jaguar jet tocrash. More than 30 fighters have crashed in India since 2012, with mostaccidents blamed on aging jets.

More than 170 Air Force pilots have died in accidents in the past threedecades, mostly in incidents involving Soviet-era MiGs — unflatteringlydubbed “flying coffins”.

Last May, two air force pilots were killed after their Russian-made jetcrashed near the border with China.

The nearly 160 European-made Jaguars in the Indian Air Force’s active fleetwere mostly inducted in the early 1980s.