Israeli Astronaut's Son Dies in F-16 Crash

This morning's Israeli media is utterly dominated by the story of 21-year-old pilot trainee Asaf Ramon's death in the crash of his F-16A during a training exercise. Israel is small enough, and the air force prestigious enough, that any fatal crash is news, but this case touched a national nerve: the pilot's father, Colonel Ilan Ramon, was Israel's only astronaut, who famously was lost in the breakup of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003. As some of the stories linked in the above sentence note (there are five separate links), the elder Ramon had also flown in the Osirak raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, in an F-16A, the same (now very aging) type of aircraft his son was flying.

The younger Ramon, a lieutenant, has been posthumously promoted to captain, an Israeli air force tradition for those lost in accidents or combat.