A Ukrainian military aircraft crashed just after noon on Sept. 29 near the city of Starokostyantyniv in Khmelnytska Oblast some 240 kilometers southwest of Kyiv.
The Ukrainian Air Force command said on its Facebook page that it had lost radio contact with an L-39 Albatross training jet at 12.21 local time while the aircraft was on a training mission.
Both pilots were killed in the crash.
Police and emergency services are operating at the crash site, and an air force commission has been convened to investigate the accident.
The air force says cause of the accident has yet to be determined.
The L-39 is a two-seat combat-capable trainer jet aircraft designed in the late 1960s in Czechoslovakia by Aero Vodochody. In the 1970s and 1980s it was put into service in the Soviet Air Force and many other air forces of the communist bloc and its satellite nations.
In the 2000s, Ukraine rolled out three domestic L-39 modifications, which now make up much of the country’s training aircraft fleet.
