I'd Rather Fly a Chopper Read online

  The only thing that we were allowed to carry back to India was my little sister’s (three years then) doll, which was taller than her. On landing at Palam airport in Delhi, at a ground reception, my sister and her doll became the star attraction of news reporters—she was there on all front covers the next day along with the horror stories that families related. Many years later, my parents told us that it was a touch-and-go situation with each day full of uncertainty about whether we would survive or not.

  ‘CENTRALIAN’ CANOPY

  Now, back to the subject of the beginnings of my long association with the IAF. Air Force Central School, or AFCS in New Delhi’s Subroto Park, subsequently renamed The Air Force School (TAFS), was the starting point. My dad had to put me in the hostel since he was leaving for Belgium in fifteen days. So there I was, in July 1972, in an IAF school from a completely non-military background—nobody in my extended family had ever thought about the military except for the ‘Jai Jawan Jai Kisan’ sloganeering. Actually, AFCS had no visible mark of being a ‘military’ school. It was a proper public school with the majority of students coming from a civilian background. Under a legendary principal, Hari Dang, the school was rated as one of the best. Mr Dang worked tirelessly to give his students a holistic education, including sports, co-curricular activities, wildlife excursions and everything else. We were major participants in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, which was later renamed the President’s Award Programme.

  I remember August 1972, when the school received a war trophy—a Pakistani tank from the Battle of Longewala. The whole day was spent watching this mammoth being mounted on a hump. I also remember the many years we spent fighting mock battles, and some other pleasant memories with girlfriends, around this tank! The school had a house system with five inspiring names—Jagriti, Shakti, Jyoti, Kirti and Shanti. Aravalli Lodge, the hostel for over 200 students, was a hotbed of inter-house rivalry from the sports fields to Holi or Diwali fights. The serene house names had no bearing on this ‘healthy’ rivalry. But like most school hostels, it imbibed confidence, self-belief and fiery competitiveness in most.

  But there were exceptions. Shahid Ali , the grandson of famous ornithologist Dr Salim Ali, was two batches my senior. He was soft-spoken, reticent and a decent boy—a slight misfit in the rough crowd. But he had a special talent for which he was well respected, and also given the farthest and corner-most room to himself. I forget the number of snakes and reptiles he kept in it! He even had a python at the Delhi Zoo. He got it for display on one Founder’s Day at school. In the interim, he kept it in the principal’s bathroom, from where it slithered off into the adjoining staffroom. There was pandemonium and public displays of emotion that amply demonstrated which of our teachers had guts.

  Our school campus was infested with snakes—mostly kraits, vipers and cobras. It was not unusual for hostelers to kill one when they discovered one in the buildings. It was also quite normal to see Shahid dashing—rare as it was—to save the snake. He was an absolute expert at catching and handling them gently.

  Our annual sojourns to Corbett National Park during the Dussehra holidays were a high point for me. The enjoyable bus rides spent singing songs at our loudest, our stories of animal encounters, and campfires deep inside Corbett are all beautiful memories of our annual tryst with nature. Our usual mentor for these was A.K. Singh, our PT teacher. A short and well-muscled man, he was actually a wrestler of repute. All the boys used to hole up in one room and the girls in another. AK and his family used to stay in a small cottage some fifty metres away. One dark night, we had just gone into our sleeping bags when the conversation turned to AK. There were loud guffaws and everyone came up with ‘AK’ jokes, some definitely below the belt. Suddenly, one of us identified a bear-like silhouette on the fly-proof door and yelled, ‘Oh god, a bhalu [bear] is outside!’ Pat came the reply, ‘It’s me, you ***. Go to sleep or I’ll eat you all up.’ There wasn’t a peep from any of us after that.

  Snakes in the Cockpit

  HAKIMPET HORROR

  This story is from Hakimpet, near Hyderabad, where fledgling helicopter pilots take their first baby steps. One afternoon an odd emergency cropped up. A Chetak helicopter had just taken off, but had abruptly landed in front of the air traffic control on the taxi-track. The call by the pilots was panicky and garbled; however, the word ‘cobra’ was clearly heard.

  A cobra that had somehow found its way into the passenger cabin and was sleeping peacefully was induced to slide forward, since a chopper takes off with an excessive nose-down attitude. It went unnoticed till it raised its hood in response to the instructor’s foot movement. Hakimpet witnessed the fastest landing, switch-off and pilot exit ever at that time! A similar incident happened to me in 1984 while flying in the Northeast.

  MIZORAM MENACE

  I was doing a detachment with a Chetak helicopter in Aizawl, Mizoram, in 1985. The army had constructed a small hangar next to Zemabawk helipad, with two rooms to serve as workstations for the air and ground crews. Those were the days of heightened insurgency across the states of Tripura, Mizoram, Nagaland and Assam, and we had to fly all across with multiple agencies involved in counter-insurgency and supporting governance. Life was frugal and full of hardships in every sense; albeit with a high sense of accomplishment.

  Air navigation was rudimentary, with voluminous ‘quarter-inch’ maps that detailed contours, and was completely reliant on a pilot’s skills to read them. A ‘moving-thumbs’ display was the surest navigation aid, where a pilot’s fingers or thumb tracked the helicopter movement on the map by the minute. It meant carrying huge bundles or folds of maps that were neatly covered with plastic sheets. These were put under the passenger seats for use during the flight.

  One fine morning, we took off early for Agartala in Tripura. The schedule was to pick up the director general (DG) of the Border Security Force (BSF) and three other senior officers who were to arrive from Delhi, give them an aerial survey of two hours over some areas mapped out and land at a base called Bogafa for the DG’s detailed briefing and lunch. Post-lunch, after dropping the team back at Agartala, we were to head back to Aizawl.

  The sortie (mission) went as planned till Bogafa. After landing, we closed all the doors so that nobody would tamper with the control systems out of curiosity. We were to wait in the officer’s mess for the DG and his team for the elaborate lunch. But only half an hour later, a constable came running to us—we were required at the helipad urgently. Now, Bogafa helipad was a small football ground with not a blade of grass on the hard-baked mud surface. On reaching there, we discovered quite a commotion around our helicopter, with at least a dozen BSF soldiers on alert with lathis. A captain-equivalent BSF officer explained that a green snake was inside the chopper. We briefed the soldiers on what not to do and opened the cargo doors. Within no time they had killed the snake, which turned out to be a green pit viper of the poisonous variety.

  We soundly rebuked all and sundry present, but secretly wondered how the slippery passenger had managed to get inside a locked chopper after traversing a large baked-clay football field. The mystery was solved in Aizawl. Our ground crew, on hearing of a snake in the helicopter, inquired whether it was green in colour. It emerged that a day ago, they had spotted it in the pilot’s room and, despite their best efforts, they could not track it, assuming in the end that it had escaped. Quite obviously, it had hidden in the maps and was comfortable till the helicopter heated up at Bogafa!

  HOMELY HERPETONS

  A helicopter pilot of the IAF gets posted to some of the most cut-off, quaint and least developed regions of the country. The good part is that though the families rough it out, they get a chance to be together even in hard field areas—albeit on the quiet in non-family stations. In 1988, I was posted from Jaisalmer in Rajasthan to Car Nicobar in the Andamans. My wife, Sheel, joined me with our two children after six months. My daughter was two years old then and my son just six months old. Our house was a temporary one-room outfit with a vera
nda covered with tin sheets, which served as a kitchen. The sea was just twenty metres away and the atmosphere was out of this world. Life was good with uniquely challenging operations at sea in Russian Mi-8 helicopters—an ample variety ranging from anti-piracy, civilian inter-island support, joint operations with the navy, to name just a few.

  As a young flight lieutenant, I was told to look after the officer’s mess, which was about 2 km from home. An official reception for a visiting air marshal was scheduled for one night and I was immersed in protocol and other arrangements. There was only one landline phone in our domestic cluster. The mess incharge came up to me and told me that a snake had been discovered in my house. I immediately took permission and ran the 2 km, picking up an IAF policeman from the guardroom on the way. It turned out that Sheel had gone to the makeshift kitchen and found a ‘long’ piece of cloth hanging from the top at one corner. Closer scrutiny showed that it was a reticulated python (15 feet, as measured later) whose both ends were still not visible. The tail was outside while the head was behind the cooking range and fridge. She had bolted the door to our room and requested a neighbour who was at home to help. Not knowing what to do, he had decided to get the master of the house quickly on the scene!

  The kitchen had space for just one person to enter, and I had hoped the police corporal would know what to do. He declined but held up a thick stick to help out. I had to go in. The snake was nowhere in sight, so I got on my knees with a torch while the corporal watched from the doorway. Suddenly, the python’s head appeared behind me, from under the cooking range, of which I was blissfully unaware. The supercharged corporal let out a war cry and some expletives in Malayalam and struck at least ten blows to the python’s head. The snake died there and then, without a chance for us to shoo it out somehow, which I had hoped to do. While measuring it, we ran out of length on the tailoring tape and had to use a foot ruler.

  MORE AT HOME

  Zora, our white boxer, was a very demanding member of the family. She was hyper, did not listen to any instructions that did not promise food in the end and was the darling of the kids. But during our posting at Hindon airbase, she proved her worth—in a way that the family still remembers fifteen years after her death.

  We had a ground floor house with an attached room that housed the electrical junction box. Full of the usual administration junk, it was basically no one’s baby; it just served as a rat colony. I was an air force examiner and was in office debriefing my boss, the commanding officer (CO), on my last inspection. The children were at school. The CO’s phone rang; he listened intently and then asked me to hurry with my report. I did so in the next ten minutes, after which he ordered me to rush home since a cobra had been spotted there. I zipped back as fast as possible along with my colleague and fellow examiner, Pannu.

  The story was that Sheel had gone out for a ladies’ club meeting, locking Zora inside the house. When she returned, she could hear Zora barking away even before she had entered the driveway. On opening the main door, she found Zora all over the sofa in front of the door to the electrical room. She was furiously sniffing, barking incessantly and leaping up and down from the sofa—all at the same time. My wife did not see anything, so she tied Zora to the handle of the main door. Zora continued barking even after my wife changed and came back out. That’s when she noticed a thick black snake slithering out from under the sofa towards the bedroom. Each time it came out, Zora would bark and charge towards it, restrained by the long leash. This would send it back. Sheel picked up a stick and kept banging it on the floor to ensure that the snake did not slither out. At the same time, she phoned my office.

  Pannu and I finally killed the poor snake, not knowing what else to do in that moment. It was a six-foot-long, fully grown cobra, known for its deadly venom. After that, we never criticized our loveable but hyper dog, knowing that she had saved us from what could have been a dangerous situation.

  EVEN MORE!

  I once watched a BBC documentary that debated the chances of getting a snakebite inside of a WC pot (toilet). I think it was one in a few million. But I almost defied this statistic on two occasions. The first was during a family holiday from the airbase at Mohanbari to Along in the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh. Traversing the mighty Brahmaputra on a ferry, across its multiple channels, took a full day, so we spent the night at the army camp at Likabali. Single-line barracks had been converted into a guest accommodation with two rooms and an attached bathroom at the end. We tucked in early since the next day’s drive was a long one, through a thousand mountain curves.

  I woke up at 5 a.m. to finish my ablutions before waking up the family. There was no electricity since the generators would come on only at 6 a.m. With a torch I found my way to the toilet, flashed it around for safety and almost sat on the WC. But something caught my eye even in the dim light. I pointed the torch into the WC, and lo and behold, a krait, an extremely venomous variety, was squirming around before it disappeared into the sewer pipe. Despite frantic efforts by the army jawans to locate it, it could not be found. Finally, some kerosene was flushed down to ensure the WC was safe to use. I kept quiet about it since there was no other toilet around except for the common one in the soldiers’ barracks some distance away. My family heard about this only when we were halfway to Along—anyway, they did not believe me!

  A decade later, I was commanding the Helicopter Training School at Hyderabad. While a completely new block had come up for training and administration; for the sake of tradition and legacy, the CO’s office was still in an older block adjoining the hangar that housed all the helicopters. My routine included an early-morning check on maintenance activities around sunrise, going back home (some 8 km away) and then getting back to office around 8.30 a.m. when flying was on in full swing.

  One day, I found some commotion outside my office. The janitor told me that a small snake had been found on the WC. The whole bathroom and my office were given a thorough shake-up before normal work resumed. The snake was sent for identification. The next day, it was the same routine, including the commotion outside my office. Another snake had been found at almost the same spot, now identified as a ‘sapola’ or a fledgling cobra. A fire tender was called in to flush out the entire sewage pipe system that was underground. The people on duty at the exit point counted twenty-seven sapolas that were flushed out. Thus the theory that someone was conspiring against the CO (me) was negated and the blame was put squarely on the ‘nagin’ that had left her clutch of eggs in an inconvenient place!

  TAMBARAM TWISTER

  The strangest thing happened in Tambaram, Madras (now Chennai), where I had gone to train as an instructor at the Flying Instructors School (FIS). The schedule was heavy for all five months, with the only saving grace being that families were allowed to rough it out together in a one-room accommodation. Flying was in two shifts, forenoon and later, with two squadrons alternating weekly. To and fro travel was done on our motorcycles since it allowed some flexibility at pack-up, which, depending on your FIS instructor, varied from early evening to late night. Helmets were compulsory while riding and were generally left on the motorcycles. Chennai is part of Romulus Whitaker’s (a famous herpetologist) forest range of the most prolific venomous snakes. In fact, Chennai houses a famous snake park set up by the equally famous naturalist.

  One day, just before noon, my co-pupil Vashist and I picked up our bikes and set off to FIS with me trailing behind him. At the midpoint (a guardroom), a police sergeant initially gave us the signal to pass but on coming closer, he gesticulated wildly for us to stop. Vashist found the sergeant keeping his distance but repeatedly pointing at his helmet. Vashist took it off and almost immediately threw it away on discovering a snake in it. Imagine the sergeant’s surprise when he saw an officer riding by with a snake’s head protruding from his helmet. This is exactly how Lord Shiva is depicted! After that, all trainee officers not only checked their bikes and helmets, but in general kept a good look-out at home for these critters as well.

>   SAVE THE SNAKE!

  Among all these hair-raising near-misses, there were many cases of fatal snakebites too, especially at night. A colleague lost his wife to a cobra bite. The diagnosis took time since only one pin-prick was seen on the big toe. Unfortunately, her condition deteriorated rapidly until it was too late. Incidentally, the other fang of the cobra was discovered embedded in her bathroom slippers later. Mare, my flight commander in the Congo peacekeeping mission, just about survived a lethal cobra bite at Jammu. All this brings me to one common observation, which is not actually a real Eureka moment. Snakes come where rats and frogs thrive; cleaning up your house and surroundings may solve half the problem. Now I get it—the logic of pre-Diwali cleaning and even Swachh Bharat!

  SAVE THE BITTEN!

  A particularly memorable snakebite evacuation that I did in Aizawl, Mizoram, comes to mind. I had just landed at the mandatory last landing at sunset with the top General on board when his Colonel, looking after operations, approached the helicopter whose rotors were still running. He came up to me and pointed towards a mountain across the river (Dhaleshwari), to an army post called Riek. A Gurkha jawan had been bitten on the head by a viper. The only possible evacuation on foot would take at least thirty-six hours, and the doctors did not think he would survive for more than a few hours. Air evacuation was the only way out. However, since it was past last landing, I went through a five-minute decision dilemma. There was only a landline to the chief of operations (COO) at the faraway base of Kumbhirgram near Silchar, and it would take at least thirty minutes to get through to him. Night flying was prohibited since these were times when one had not even heard of night-vision devices.

  I took the call as only a young flying officer would, with little knowledge and even lesser fear of ramifications. Disembarking the General, I flew to Riek with instructions to light up the helipad with everything possible. One look at the soldier being brought on a stretcher convinced me of having done the right thing. His head was swollen and grotesque—like an alien from another planet. After landing in Aizawl, I got through to the COO at Kumbhirgram base. The next fifteen minutes were spent in listening to the choicest expletives and details of my extremely objectionable professional conduct and poor pedigree. He could not ground me since there was no other captain to fly the next day. The soldier did survive, which was very gratifying; however, the written warning a few days later was not. But that’s aviation for you—hot and cold, and unpredictable.