Sputnik News Agency reported from Damascus that “a Syrian Air Force’s fighter jet crashed Sunday after the take-off from an airport in the western province of Hama leaving its pilot dead and killing two people on a runway, a military source told Sputnik.
According to another report by Reuters on Sunday , the city of Hama, in western Syria, is controlled by the Syrian government. Several Russian-manufactured warplanes have crashed since the start of the year, mostly due to technical failures which defence analysts have generally attributed to age.
A rebel source told Reuters the plane that crashed was a Russian Mig 21 fighter but this could not be independently verified.
Source: Sputnik, Reuters, 19 June 2016