
What is the Chinese-made F-7 jet that crashed into Bangladesh school?
Here's what we know about the F-7 BGI jet that went down:
The F-7 BGI, which crashed soon after take-off, is a lightweight fighter jet, the final and most advanced version of China's Chengdu J-7/F-7 family, according to Jane's Information Group.
The Chengdu J-7 is the licence-built version of the Soviet era MiG-21 and is used for training and limited combat roles. The F-7 is the export variant of J-7.
The South Asian country's air force has operated F-7 variants since the 1980s. Dhaka signed a contract for 16 BGI version aircraft in 2011 and deliveries were completed by 2013 - the final batch of the manufactured jets.
China manufactured the jets from 1965 to 2013, making it one of the longest-running fighter production lines there. Due to its affordability, the jet was widely exported, especially to developing nations.
The J-7 was fully decommissioned from the Chinese military by the end of 2023 but several countries still use the export variant.
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Iran and North Korea are among the countries that have used or still use variants of the F-7.
Pakistan is the largest operator of F-7 aircraft and has 66 of them, according to the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies.
Pakistan also has one of China's most advanced warplanes, the J-10, and used it to launch air-to-air missiles to bring down at least two Indian fighter jets during the recent conflict between the two countries.
May 2025 - An Air Force of Zimbabwe pilot died when a F-7 crashed during a routine sortie in the Southern African nation.
June 2022 - A J-7 crashed into residential buildings in the Chinese city of Xiangyang in central Hubei Province, killing at least one person on the ground.
May 2022 - Two Iranian pilots died after their F-7 crashed during a training mission near Anarak, 200 km (125 miles) east of the city of Isfahan.
January 2022 - Two Pakistani Air Force pilots were killed when a FT-7 aircraft, a variant of the F-7, crashed.
There have been a number of other incidents with F-7 jets in Pakistan that resulted in deaths of pilots.

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The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
‘The real issue is change': Edinburgh University's first Black philosophy professor on racism and reform
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'I'll be the subject of another report, but I won't have influence, I wouldn't have ushered in any of the people that look like me that the world said couldn't be.' The point is not to simply produce a report but to act, he said. 'The real fundamental issue is change. Not a symbolic apology, not a pay cheque. [How] do you create leagues of Black thinkers and clinicians and doctors and engineers and artists that fill the gap of what were lost by what white people engineered for centuries that deprived the world of Black human genius. That's why this report matters so much to me.' In turn, he added, Scotland could become better equipped to tackle the endemic problems of racial disparity in health outcomes, mortality, employment, housing, education. 'So when you think of it this way, what does reparations mean if it doesn't mean dealing with the consequences that were created by the very institutions you want to write the cheque?' 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Frith points to the review team's decision to recruit paid Black and minority ethnic scholars and activists who specialise in colonialism, reparations policy and the repatriation of remains. Edinburgh has been a leading centre for reparations research for a decade, she said, since it held an international conference on reparations in 2015. The university, led by its principal, Peter Mathieson, made what Frith calls the 'really good decision' to set up the review after a 'collective groundswell' from staff and students to respond to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and Glasgow University's groundbreaking report in 2018 on its slavery debt, as well as a controversy at Edinburgh in 2020 over the renaming of a university building named after the philosopher and alumnus David Hume, author of a 'notorious footnote' in 1753 claiming 'the Negroes' were 'naturally inferior'. 'I don't see that history as something that sits in the past with a closed door,' Frith adds. 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