Two days after a French fighter jet came down in the woods of Lorraine, prosecutors in Metz have confirmed what the families feared: neither of the two airmen on board survived. DNA tests are still under way to formally identify them.
The jet, a two-seater Mirage 2000D belonging to squadron 2/3 “Champagne”, crashed at about 10:40 p.m. on Tuesday near the village of Rogéville, roughly 20 kilometres north-west of Nancy. The crew were heading home to Nancy-Ochey air base after a night training sortie. During the instrument approach, controllers suddenly lost both radio and radar contact. An air force spokesman said no distress signal was sent and no one tried to eject.
People living nearby reported a loud bang and a ball of fire. Fog and foul weather hampered the overnight search, and it was a drone that eventually located the wreckage; a gendarmerie helicopter could only fly over the site the following day.
The names were released by Catherine Vautrin, who heads the armed forces ministry. Antranig Sarkissian, a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel, was a seasoned weapons systems officer who had flown around 2,200 hours, including 55 combat sorties, from Afghanistan to Mali and Chad. Lieutenant Quentin Klysz, 27, had logged 450 hours and was working towards his qualification as an operational combat pilot.
A military safety inquiry and a judicial investigation will try to establish the cause. The base commander urged caution about early theories, noting only that conditions that night were poor. The aircraft had been upgraded recently under a mid-life programme for the Mirage 2000D fleet that wrapped up in June.
It is a painful echo for the base. In January 2019 another Mirage 2000D from Nancy-Ochey went down in the Jura, and both airmen died; investigators later pointed to spatial disorientation as the likely cause.
