News of the crash rocked the Jewish state, where Ramon is regarded as a national hero. Dozens of senior military officers and well-wishers gathered outside of the family home in central Israel.

The single-seat warplane crashed in a remote hilly region south of the West Bank city of Hebron, the military said, adding that it was not immediately clear what had caused the accident.

Military officials named the pilot as Lieutenant Assaf Ramon, 21, the eldest son of Colonel Ilan Ramon, an Israeli fighter pilot who became the country's first and only astronaut.

Ilan Ramon was killed along with six others when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over the US state of Texas six years ago.

In interviews after the Columbia disaster, Assaf Ramon said that he too hoped to one day become an astronaut. He graduated from the Israeli air force pilot's course earlier this year.

State television and radio dedicated special broadcasts to the tragedy, showing video of Assaf Ramon receiving his pilot wings from President Shimon Peres.

The military said the aircraft crashed during a routine flight as part of the advanced pilot training course.

Witnesses said debris from the plane was spread across a wide swathe of the sparsely populated region.

"I saw a huge ball of fire and after that black smoke," Michal Weiss, from the nearby Jewish settlement of Pene Hever, told public radio.

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