Israel was in mourning on Monday as it buried the young pilot son of the Jewish state's first and only astronaut, himself killed in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster.
Assaf Ramon, 21, died on Sunday when the F-16 fighter jet he was flying crashed in the southern hills of the occupied West Bank.
He was the eldest son of Ilan Ramon, a fighter pilot who became the Jewish state's first and only astronaut and is regarded as a national hero, and the news of his death shocked Israel.
The pilot's funeral at a cemetery in the northern Israeli village of Nahalal was attended by thousands of mourners, including President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"The whole nation today mourns the death of one of its best sons," Peres said in a eulogy.
The coffin, wrapped in an Israeli flag, was lowered into the ground by six cadets from the air force school where Ramon had graduated at the top of his class.
The crash dominated news coverage for a second day in a row and Netanyahu postponed a key meeting with the visiting US Middle East envoy George Mitchell to attend the funeral.
"Few are the moments in which private pain so strongly shatters the national heart," Netanyahu's office quoted him as saying in his condolence message to the Ramon family.
"Today, the entire nation is wrapped in unfathomable grief over the death of Assaf Ramon, who fell from the skies like his father Ilan," he said.
Israeli radio stations played melancholy songs throughout the day and newspapers devoted numerous pages to stories and pictures of handsome Ramon, who had completed his pilot training course in June.
During the training, Ramon was safely guided down by his instructor after the plane he was flying experienced engine failure, public television reported in March.
In July he began an advanced flight training course and Sunday's crash occurred during routine training. His performance up to now indicated he was a good pilot, media reported.
A military spokeswoman said an inquiry had been launched.
F-16 training flights, which were suspended after the accident, will resume on Tuesday, military radio reported.
The decision to resume flights reinforces the theory that the crash was likely caused by pilot error rather than a technical breakdown, military radio said.
In interviews after the Columbia disaster in which his father died, Ramon said that he too hoped to one day become an astronaut.
Astronaut Ilan Ramon was killed along with six others when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over the US state of Texas on February 1, 2003.
The son of a Holocaust survivor, Ramon was already famous in his homeland for taking part in the 1981 air raid that destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor.
On June 7 that year, eight US-made F-16s with an escort of six F-15s flew undetected over Arab territory to launch the surprise attack on the French-built reactor.
In 1997, Ilan Ramon was selected by NASA to train in the United States as Israel's first man in space as a payload specialist aboard Columbia.
Copyright 2009 AFP Global Edition
