A Hungarian Gripen fighter jet crashed on Monday morning near Szolnok. The pilot managed to eject and is alive. The cause, for now, is unknown.

Prime minister Peter Magyar confirmed the incident had happened, without giving a cause. Defence minister Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi said the pilot was taken to hospital by ambulance and that nobody else was injured.

One detail in the reports deserves to be lifted out of the dry chronology. The pilot managed to steer the aircraft to come down on military ground, reducing the risk to civilians and nearby buildings. Which means that in the seconds before ejecting, somebody in that cockpit was calculating where several tonnes of metal were allowed to land. That is not luck. That is training.

Fourteen aircraft for an entire country

Hungary has 14 Gripen jets stationed at the Kecskemet base. The Swedish Saab JAS 39C/D are used for air defence and for NATO operations, including missions protecting Baltic airspace.

With 14 aircraft in the whole fleet, one lost is not a statistic. It is a noticeable share of a country's ability to defend its own sky, evaporated in a single morning - and at a moment when the whole of Europe is talking about conflicts widening rather than calming down.

A neighbouring country, the same class of aircraft being bought across the region, the same sky over all of us. From Szolnok to Skopje is fewer kilometres than from Szolnok to Brussels, where the defence strategies get written.