Two pilots were tragically killed in a mid-air collision with two Dassault Rafale fighter jets over northern France on Wednesday, prompting a large-scale military rescue operation to scour a remote forest. After an intensive 10-hour search, authorities confirmed the devastating news that two servicemen had died in the crash.
The plane crash occurred over Colombey-les-Belles in north-eastern France just after 10.30pm, with shocked residents reporting “debris everywhere” and a thundering explosion rocking the area. A pilot, flying alone in one of the £130million planes, managed to jump out of his jet and was quickly found, injured but awake, and taken to a local hospital.
For the occupants of the other jet, flight instructor Captain Sebastien Mabire and student lieutenant Matthis Laurens, the search would end in tragedy. Both fighter jets came from the Saint-Dizier air base, a major training location for French fighter pilots.
In the aftermath of this national tragedy, President Emmanuel Macron expressed his sorrow Twitterwhich states: “We learned with sadness of the death of Captain Sebastien Mabire and Lieutenant Matthis Laurens, in a plane crash during a Rafale training mission. The nation shares the grief of their families and comrades in arms at Air Base 113 in Saint-Dizier.”
“I was eating, a plane flew over me, it was flying north, there was some kind of explosion and it caught fire,” said Laëtitia, a resident of the nearby Vosges. “It fell in the forest, it crashed, near the road to Colombey-les-belles. I only saw a plane. It made a huge black cloud.”
“We heard a loud noise, around 12:30,” Patrice Bonneaux, deputy mayor of Colombey-les-Belles, told French media. It was not the usual sonic boom of a fighter jet breaking the sound barrier, he said. “It was a strange noise, a percussive noise.”
“I assumed that two planes had collided, but we didn't believe that.”
The Dassault Rafale is the workhorse of the country’s air force, a multi-role fighter jet that has been in service for more than two decades and has been deployed around the world. It has fired laser-guided missiles in Afghanistan (2007) and attacked jihadist camps in Mali (2013).
The French Ministry of Defense has launched an investigation into the incident, which occurred during a refueling training mission. The country's air force said: “Security and judicial investigations are being launched to shed light on the reasons for this accident.”
There has not been a major crash involving a Rafale in years, with only two major incidents in 2007 and 2009. In the first incident, a disoriented pilot dived 4,000 metres and crashed, while in the 2009 incident, two trainee pilots collided while landing on an aircraft carrier, killing one.