India's Most Fearless 2

by Shiv Aroor

  Even with the daunting uncertainties he was faced with, Sqn Ldr Ajit was sure about one thing. That he would not eject from the aircraft. The option had been presented to him from the ground, but he had calmly declined. Yanking the ejection handle would have given him a possibly safe emergency escape, blowing away the aircraft’s canopy, the rocket-powered Russian Zvezda K-36 ejection seat with an attached parachute violently firing him out of the MiG-29. But Sqn Ldr Ajit wasn’t so sure.

  In the next few minutes, Finback 2 arrived alongside the troubled MiG-29. Sqn Ldr Rohit was still not fully aware what his friend was going through in his cockpit. He looked out of his jet at Finback 1, hoping to get a visual confirmation that things were in control. The sight was a shocking one.

  ‘I couldn’t see Vasane,’ says Sqn Ldr Rohit. ‘The cockpit was filled with smoke and the front portion of the windshield had deposits of soot. I don’t know how he was sitting inside that cockpit and flying the aircraft.’

  He was right. Sqn Ldr Ajit had, by now, been forced to resort to desperate measures to contain the fire and put it out. He had first tried to douse the spreading flames with his hands. The plan didn’t work as the strands of molten plastic adhered to his fire-resistant gloves and he could feel his fingers getting singed.

  ‘I swiftly took off my gloves and tried using them as a duster to smother the fire,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit. ‘Nothing seemed to be working. The intensity of the fire kept increasing. My hands were being badly burnt.’

  The pilot’s eyes had begun to sting and water because of the smoke, and the irritation was growing with every passing second. His helmet’s anti-glare visor provided no protection against the dense smoke. For the moment, breathing wasn’t as much of a problem in the smoke-filled cockpit as he had his oxygen mask on. But visibility was totally gone. All he could see was a blanket of grey before his eyes. The cockpit panel, with its bright screens, was no longer even faintly visible.

  ‘My vision was now blurred and there was a heavy deposit of soot on the windshield,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit. ‘It was all covered in black. I was flying totally blind.’

  About 40 km from Jamnagar, Sqn Ldr Ajit was advised by the radio controller to descend to about 10,000 feet. Making any abrupt moves with the aircraft was out of the question. The pilot carefully pushed his stick forward, easing the aircraft into a slow descent. If the cockpit fire was eating away at the insides of the aircraft, its structural integrity could be compromised. Fighter aircraft are made of some of the sturdiest materials in the world, but a fire could easily cause the sort of damage that would seriously hamper flying stability. Worse, it could take control completely out of the pilot’s hands.

  As the pilot weighed his options, the thought of jettisoning the MiG-29’s canopy crossed his mind. On one hand, it would immediately help with the smoke situation. But on the other, there was every chance it would make matters much, much worse. For one thing, blowing off the canopy would suddenly bring a roar of noise from the wind—the MiG-29 was still flying at over 600 kmph.

  ‘In that sound blast, I would not be able to communicate with the radar controller or my wingman,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit. ‘I would essentially be flying the aircraft on my own. I was tempted, because the smoke had by now nearly blinded me, but I knew I would be deprived of whatever help I was getting from the ground.’

  A sudden rush of wind could also fan the fire into a larger blaze and push it to other parts of the aircraft. It was out of the question, the pilot decided. He had no choice but to continue flying the jet with the canopy firmly on for as long as he could bear the now-choking fire and smoke. What he therefore decided was to fly blind, almost fully dependent on his radar controller.

  The toxic plastic fumes became thicker and continued to build up inside the cockpit as the fire quickly spread to other parts of the panel, melting them and distorting the instrument frames. It had now become unbearable. Bits of smoke had begun to seep into the pilot’s oxygen mask from the gaps, causing him to cough and wheeze through the cloud, forcing him to again attempt to put out the fire with his now-burnt gloves. But the fire was there to stay. Trying to douse it in any manner was futile.

  ‘Picture a fighter cockpit. It’s a really small, confined place stuffed with a whole lot of things, including the pilot. And then there was the fire. It could do a lot of bad things and really fast,’ Sqn Ldr Ajit says.

  It had been seven minutes into the emergency when the radio control piped up again. He wanted to check if the fire had shut off any of the aircraft’s vital systems. Even if the flames hadn’t eaten into the fuel tanks, they could still destroy the complex electronics that kept the aircraft stable and the systems that kept the engines running. Losing system indicators was bad enough. Losing the systems themselves would have meant Finback 1 possibly falling out of the sky, with no more options left to the pilot.

  ‘I had begun to see the lack of a catastrophic explosion or deviation as a stroke of luck,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit. ‘But I was sure that luck wasn’t going to last. Fire does not cooperate. It does not wait for you to take a decision. If the fire killed my systems, none of my flying skills would be of any use. With my instruments and visibility gone, I was entering a situation where I would have no clue about how high and how fast I was flying, and what the engine was doing or, for that matter, the other systems required for landing.’

  Finback 1’s cockpit had become a terrifying workplace for any fighter pilot, irrespective of his training and experience. If one of the MiG-29’s two Klimov RD-33 engines failed, there would be no instrument forewarning in the cockpit. It is instruments that routinely tell the pilot about engine power and revolutions per minute (RPM)—information that is vital to the pilot.

  ‘If panic were to set in, this would have been a good time—at this point, I was desperately concerned about the fire depriving me of vital inputs,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit.

  Descending to an altitude below 10,000 feet quickly was critical at this juncture. At that height, Sqn Ldr Ajit would have the option of activating a ventilation system to drive the smoke out of the cockpit.

  ‘The air-conditioning system on the plane has options of “normal” and “flood”. Additional air flows inside the cockpit when “flood” is selected. I needed to descend below 10,000 feet for this option to work effectively,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit.

  Strapped in his seat in the burning cockpit with the sun blazing behind him, Finback 1 continued its descent, with Finback 2 flying above and to his left.

  ‘I could see Vasane’s plane below mine, but I didn’t know what exactly was going on inside,’ says Sqn Ldr Rohit, who was flying Finback 2. ‘The MiG-29 technical handbook lists several emergencies such as engine failure, flameout and loss of oil pressure. We know how to deal with those issues. But a cockpit fire was something new. How do you handle a problem that has never been encountered before?’

  As the pair of MiG-29 jets cruised towards their Jamnagar base guided by the radar controller, the cockpit fire assumed its worst form thus far. For the first time in the minutes since the emergency began, Sqn Ldr Ajit wondered if ejecting from the jet was the only way to survive. Ejection seats in modern fighters have a success rate of more than 90 per cent, but pilots can end up with broken spines because of the sudden explosive force that rockets them out of the cockpit.

  Even as the fumes choked the pilot, activating the ejection sequence was near unthinkable. Because emerging over the horizon just then was the Reliance Industries refinery complex, which is south-west of Jamnagar city. The heat inside the cockpit was now painful and it had become difficult to breathe. If the human instinct to survive overwhelmed everything else, a pilot in such a situation would bail out of his aircraft. Self-preservation, after all, is the most powerful impulse in all human beings. It would matter less at that point that the blazing wreck of his aircraft could glide unstoppably like a missile into the world’s largest crude oil refinery to spark what would almost definitely be an inferno of historic proportions.

  ‘Th
e radar controller was continuously giving me the course and distance from the base,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit. ‘If I were to draw a line from my position to the base, the flight path ran right above the refineries. I had been operating from the Jamnagar base for nearly three years and I knew I was in the danger zone. You just can’t crash your plane there. I am not supposed to violate the 2-km rule under any circumstances. So there was absolutely no question of not adhering to the restriction on a day when my plane could explode any moment. I decided not to eject until it was absolutely necessary. And by this time, I felt I was mere seconds away from that situation.’

  Fully aware of the consequences of his aircraft crashing into one of the refineries below, the pilot of Finback 1 took the most difficult decision of his flying career. Informing the radio controller that he was concerned he would soon lose control over his jet, Sqn Ldr Ajit peeled away to the right, putting 10 km between his aircraft and the refinery complex. He had chosen to take a longer route back to the base, adding excruciating minutes to his flight time.

  ‘In my mind, it was the only way to ensure that there wasn’t a bigger tragedy on the ground,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit. ‘The refineries were my big worry. I kept thinking, what if my aircraft suddenly turned left and I was unable to control it? In a matter of seconds, the plane could have crashed into one of the refineries, causing unimaginable damage. I just wanted to land my aircraft soon.’

  Slowly descending to below 10,000 feet, the pilot set the MiG-29’s air-conditioning system to ‘flood’ mode, hoping to drive the thick cloud of smoke out of the cockpit. It didn’t help, but with wisps of smoke dragged out of the cockpit, it stopped the smoke build-up from intensifying any further. The aircraft had begun to shudder slightly, indicating possible internal damage. Sqn Ldr Ajit still held off on ejecting—he made a mental note to be fully prepared to make that split-second decision, if required. Fighter pilots don’t eject at the first sign of trouble. They are trained to calmly follow drills to avoid casualties on the ground as a priority, even if that means putting their own lives at enormous risk.

  Under the guidance of ground control, Finback 1 continued its descent. The Jamnagar base was finally now on the horizon, except that Sqn Ldr Ajit couldn’t see it. He and his wingman had flown identical missions several times before and were fully familiar with the ground features that would lead them back to the base they had departed just 15 minutes ago. But with his visibility completely compromised, Sqn Ldr Ajit listened carefully for visual cues from his wingman flying above and behind him now.

  Still flying blind as he lowered his landing gear and came in for a final approach, Sqn Ldr Ajit finally spotted the runway. A tiny keyhole-sized gap in the smoke had opened right above his HUD, affording the smallest glimpse of the outside world for the first time since the fire had ruined his visibility. With a rush of confidence, reducing his speed to 280 kmph, Finback 1 descended the final few metres to touch down on the Jamnagar tarmac.

  As the aircraft sped down the runway, Sqn Ldr Ajit saw a pair of crash tender trucks positioned alongside the far end, ready to douse the aircraft with high pressure water jets, if necessary. Sqn Ldr Rohit watched from above as the stricken MiG-29 jet deployed its chute and rolled to a halt.

  ‘I breathed a sigh of relief in the cockpit,’ says Sqn Ldr Rohit. ‘It takes exceptional skill, presence of mind and plenty of guts to fly and land a doomed plane safely. I sent a word of congratulations from the air before circling around and bringing my own jet in.’

  The fire in the cockpit was still burning as Finback 1’s canopy finally opened, rapidly dissipating the smoke that had collected inside. Quickly unstrapping himself, the pilot climbed out of the aircraft. He had flown in a crippling blanket of smoke for nine minutes, but as Sqn Ldr Ajit stepped out of the aircraft, he found himself reaching into a zipper in his overalls for his pack of cigarettes. Picked up by a jeep, he lit up on the short drive back to the operations room, where he would brief his seniors about an emergency none of them had ever encountered before.

  The MiG-29 was put down as ‘unserviceable’ in the aircraft’s logbook. Over the next two hours, Sqn Ldr Ajit would brief his Flight Commander, the CO, the Chief Operations Officer and the Air Commodore commanding the Jamnagar fighter base about those nine minutes. He was the first Indian fighter pilot to encounter what had just happened. And he had managed to not only survive, but bring the aircraft safely back to base. If he had ejected—and nobody would have blamed him had he chosen to—the mystery of the cockpit fire would likely have remained unsolved, throwing into peril the flight safety of the fleet going forward.

  By the time he was done with the briefings, the MiG-29’s technical crews were waiting to get a low-down on the unprecedented emergency—a crisis that had brought the base to a virtual standstill for two hours.

  ‘I had to explain everything to the technical guys so that they could identify the glitch and fix it,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit. ‘It was in their hands now. I told them everything I had experienced. It was up to them now to ensure that the same thing never happened again.’

  The one thing the young pilot hadn’t done was call his wife, Sqn Ldr Rajeev Kaur, also an Air Force officer posted in Jamnagar. The two had met and fallen in love three years ago, when they were posted at the Adampur fighter base in Punjab. It was their first posting after joining the Air Force as officers. When Sqn Ldr Ajit survived that cockpit fire, they had been married for a year.

  Sqn Ldr Rajeev, part of the IAF’s accounts branch at the base, had gone to the office of the Jamnagar base commander at around 4 p.m. that evening to get a file cleared. It was there that she heard hushed whispers among the staff that a MiG-29 piloted by her husband had managed to land at the base a few minutes earlier after a critical emergency in the air.

  ‘In the waiting room, the base commander’s personal assistant told me about the incident,’ says the pilot’s wife. ‘I asked him for details but he said, “Oh, nothing to worry about.” Then my husband’s flight commander, Wg Cdr Shekhar Yadav, entered the room. I asked him the same question. All he said was, “Don’t worry, nothing serious,” and went in to brief the base commander.’

  Extremely anxious about what could have possibly happened, she began to dial her husband’s phone, fuming that he hadn’t called her on landing. After several attempts, he answered. She demanded to know what had happened and why nobody was sharing any details with her.

  ‘Yaar, kuch nahi hua hai (Nothing has happened),’ Sqn Ldr Ajit said with a chuckle. ‘Who told you all this? I am having chai in the squadron. Don’t worry. All is well.’

  She was enormously relieved that he was back on the ground, but resented being kept out of the loop. At dinner that evening, she probed her husband a little more, perplexed that he wasn’t more forthcoming with details of the mid-air drama.

  ‘It was a routine sortie,’ her husband had said, taking her hand from across the table. ‘I am here having dinner with you. Everything’s okay. Can we talk about something else, please?’

  Sqn Ldr Rajeev would learn the full story only by chance that weekend at a party hosted by the Jamnagar base commander and his wife to celebrate their wedding anniversary. At the party, the chief operations officer of the base, a Group Captain, asked her if she had taken a look at the aircraft her husband had flown five days earlier.

  ‘You must go and see that aircraft if you haven’t already,’ the Group Captain said. She had almost forgotten about the incident by this time. ‘It was only then that I got to know about the scary emergency. I remember losing my cool with him for keeping me in the dark. I told him this was not done. How could he not tell me? But I realized later that he was dealing with it as well, and didn’t want me to worry. But nobody can stop worrying. Fighter pilots can be crazy. Mine definitely is.’

  That night, Sqn Ldr Ajit was allowed to sleep only after he recounted, in the minutest detail, what had happened on his flight that October afternoon.

  ‘The briefing I gave her was probably more detaile
d than the ones I gave to my seniors after landing,’ Sqn Ldr Ajit smiles.

  The emergency on board Finback 1 had become the talk of the entire flying branch of the IAF that week. If the pilot needed a few days to calm down and recover, he didn’t give any such indication. Sqn Ldr Ajit was back in the cockpit of a MiG-29 the day after the incident, out on another training mission.

  ‘I was only doing my job, which is to train every single day through the year. I don’t think it was an event to celebrate, or for that matter, to even thank God for keeping me safe. I never thought it was a big deal,’ he says.

  Sqn Ldr Ajit may not have thought it a big deal, but it was more than that for the IAF. Awkward about the sudden flood of attention he was receiving, the pilot wouldn’t know at the time that the calm resilience he had displayed in the air for nine hellish minutes would earn him a Shaurya Chakra, the country’s third-highest peacetime gallantry award, ten months later.

  Posted out of Jamnagar a few months after the incident, to Tambaram in Tamil Nadu to train as a flying instructor, Sqn Ldr Ajit would learn about the decoration headed his way as he sat down to dinner with his course-mates one night.

  ‘I had completely forgotten about the incident,’ he says. ‘I had moved on. And here I was, fielding congratulatory calls all night. I must admit it felt good, but I still say I was just doing my job.’

  On the eve of Independence Day 2012, the government announced the gallantry decoration for a pilot who had displayed ‘nerves of steel and unwavering commitment to the mission assigned to him’. His Shaurya Chakra citation would heap praise on him for handling a critical emergency that was ‘neither documented nor had occurred before in a MiG-29 aircraft’.

  He would play down the courage he displayed in the air when he spoke to his colleagues and his wife, but the Shaurya Chakra citation was unequivocal in its praise:

  ‘Amid rapidly increasing intensity of fire and at great personal risk, he initiated emergency recovery of the aircraft. With exceptional presence of mind and courage of highest order, he elected to avoid flying over various petrochemical installations in the vicinity of the airfield, even though this prolonged flight endangered his life,’ reads the citation. ‘Despite limited visibility due to soot deposits on the windshield, Vasane skilfully positioned the MiG-29 jet for an emergency landing that he executed flawlessly. Throughout the flight, he maintained extreme calm and composure, devotion to duty and thorough professionalism in keeping with the highest traditions of the IAF.’