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The Naval Aviation Museum at Vasco, Goa, has a board listing names of aviators the Indian Navy has lost to air crashes. The latest names to go up on the board will be those of Lt Cdr Dharmendra Singh, Lt Rahul Tiwari and technical sailor H. Krishnan, the three Navy personnel who died when their Chetak helicopter crashed at Goa’s Dabolim Airport on October 15. It is a befitting tribute to those bravehearts, no doubt, but it is just one half of a story.
Unlike popular perception that defence aircraft are “flying coffins”, aviation cadres are actually teeming with pilots who have survived crashes and resumed flying careers only temporarily grounded by the accident. At least half the air crashes, if not more, aren't fatal, which is why they are dismissed as news snippets. This is that unreported half of the story.
A crash is no ordinary matter; every survivor looks back at that day as a second birthday. But as Cdr Manik Mehta, 37, a jet trainer says, “It doesn't have to be an air crash. I had another brush with death in my car with my family. I have had so many new leases of life that I've stopped keeping track of the various birthdays.”
Mehta was on a routine exercise on December 16, 2004 when, while practising a slow land procedure, his craft swerved off the runway and turned turtle. The standard operational procedures (SOP) that hours of training had drilled into him, reflexively made him reach out and switch off the engine. “Everyone was waiting for the explosion, it didn't come,” he smiles grimly, recalling how a fortunate tear in the canopy helped his evacuation from the ejection seat, to which he was strapped and now upside down.
He remembers his first reaction wasn't shock, relief or gratitude. It was embarrassment. “I had only a scratch, I actually went home for lunch, and there was my craft, all damaged.” Later in hospital, where he was admitted for observation, his admiral said, “It’s okay, it happens to the best of us.” Mehta got his perspective. He has no exceptional memories of his first re-entry to the cockpit after he was cleared for flying (after a crash, pilots are compulsorily observed for mental and physical symptoms before they are cleared to fly again). “Flying is a very focussed job,” he says. “You have to follow the SOP to the second and your mind is so occupied that there is little place for any other thought.” The son of an Army parachuter, he remembers his father’s words: “If you have to get back to the cockpit, you have to. We are soldiers.”
The incident, however, does get tucked into a recess of the memory as “experience”. Handling a crash is that part of a pilot’s training that is theoretical. It’s rehearsed thoroughly, every pilot knows just how to eject and what to expect. Yet, only one who has survived actually knows what the experience actually is.
Capt. Vikram Menon is the veteran of not one, but two ejections. He, however, claims every crash is a unique experience, as circumstances are different. He first parachuted out in 2001, when, while on a test sortie, the craft began losing height. He ejected and was in the thick of pre-monsoon clouds over Goa, completely blind. Goa is hilly terrain, and it was providence that he fell into a dam with only a few feet of water. The wreckage of the craft was later found in the hills.
In the blinding rain all around, Menon actually trekked up to a road, took a lift from a passing motorcyclist and reached the nearest police station. He even stopped at a phone booth to inform the Air Traffic Control of the crash and state no one was hit. An hour later, he was in the hills with the scouts, looking for wreckage. “I guess I was shaken, but there was no time for rational thought. I was working like a zombie,” recalls the Harrier pilot, now posted at the Naval Headquarters, Delhi. “I was very conscious when I returned to flying a few weeks later.
It wasn't fear, but an acute sense of awareness,” he says. Pointing out that the organisational structure is such that mental and physical recovery happen without the individual being actually aware of it, he believes it’s tougher for wives. “I actually wrote a poem on them after the crash,” he says. The pilot notes that every procedure is so clinical that there is not much room to dwell upon emotions. “There are briefings and debriefings,” says Menon. “You learn to be upfront, discuss the incident clinically. The professional approach helps.”
Yet, he remembers asking the base psychiatrist whether he'd have to sit for a few sessions. “He told me only if I wanted, there'd be sessions. The Indian social structure is strong enough, with family and squadron backing.” He remembers feeling “eyes on him” while in office. “ I'd tell myself that it would be natural,” he says. “You have to put the incident behind and move on.”
Menon lost a comrade while training at the Air Force base. He didn't know he would lose a student, too. This happened in 2007 while returning from a training sortie.
They decided to eject when they had control failure and began losing height rapidly. Both fell into the Arabian Sea, and Menon’s head bobbed up shortly, Saurabh Tiwari’s never did. Is there survivor guilt? “I cannot explain what I feel,” he says. “We went out together, I returned alone, and 10 days later received his body. But you learn to deal with these issues.” He is cleared for flying, but hasn't yet gone back only because he is in a non-flying appointment at present.
The inquiry report said Tiwari may not have pressed the ejection button on time. The delay, however, might just have been a split second one. Between the decision to bail out to the pilot touching earth is barely a matter of a few minutes.
MIG pilot Lt Cdr Vikram Chauhan knows just how important those seconds are. “When you are in a plane that is burning, there is this false sense that at least the cockpit is secure. It’s difficult to cut the umbilicus, but that is the lesson I have learnt from my crash of 2007. That just like every SOP to sort the aircraft problem, ejection is also an action and has to be done at the right time,” says the son of a MIG 27 fighter pilot, who, too, had ejected in 1995.
Cdr Vishal Bishnoi, till recently the commanding officer of INAS 300 in Vasco, likes to remember his crash of 1999 as one big adventure. He was attached to the Air Force in Chabua, Assam, when on a sortie, the 26-year-old heard an explosion and felt a fireball behind. A moment later he realised his craft was on fire. “I ejected and blacked out,” he says. “When I opened my eyes, I tried figuring out where I’d land. I wasn't keen to fall on an electric wire or a thorny bush.” He was lucky, he landed in a college ground. Even before he could get out of his chute, he was surrounded by a crowd of autograph seekers. “I signed with borrowed pens. Then an old woman touched my feet, I was a miracle apparently,” he chuckles.
For Bishnoi, the most difficult part of the crash was the grounding. “A fighter pilot is happiest when he flies. Else he is crabby,” says Bishnoi. The grounding, however, is part of SOP. Nothing can be rushed, all physical and psychological tests have to be cleared. “I felt quite fine after I landed, so I even protested the hospitalisation. That evening, a former ejectee visited me and said, I’d have cramps the next day.” He notes that organisationally, everything is taken care of, even such visits, all of which help the pilot recover. A custom among pilots is that an ejection is celebrated with a bottle of champagne. The road to recovery begins at that point, they grin.
But behind the grins are grim lessons. “As I lay in hospital, I thought, what if I had to eject at night. That thought still haunts me, now even more,” says Bishnoi, sombre for the first time during the interview.
Accidents don't always happen in air. They can be on the deck, too. Ground resonance is a problem typical to helicopters. For inexplicable reasons, choppers sometimes build up vibrations and can disintegrate within moments of touching down. Four years ago, after a two-hour-long mission sortie, Cdr Narayan Singh Baberwal landed his Kamov chopper on INS Talwar, when the resonance picked up even as the ground crew was lashing the chopper to the deck. “The observer and I were jumping up and down in our seats, the deck was turbulent, too. We didn’t talk, but worked in sync, switching off controls and jumping out. It was just in time. Kamovs have two sets of rotors and the debris of six blades flew all around. There was also a minor fire, but no one was injured. In fact this was the first case of a ground resonance with no casualty in the Indian Navy,” recalls the officer as he gets ready for another air sortie.
He often thinks about his good luck: they were in the open sea, which added to the risk. But soon after the officers got the medical clearances and the aircraft their clearance, the buddy pair was flying again. “We’ve even landed on the decks of similar ships, it is our job after all,” says Singh. Doesn’t he ever get nervous? He says: “We joined the job knowing it is a high risk one. Having said that, even my wife knows that I am as much at risk in my chopper as a Mumbai commuter is in a suburban local.”
Training is an ongoing process
Military flying is a demanding job, maritime flying even more so. Your medium is different, the perception of depth is different. Night flying over the sea is even more challenging, and while pilots are trained for all this, we create an atmosphere where issues like disorientation are not considered an embarrassment, but topics that should be discussed professionally.
This training is a continuous process, built into the daily schedule, it is not something that is taught as one module during a course. A pilot’s psyche is toughened over the years, it starts with the training itself. After every incident, we have debriefs, where everything is dealt with clinically.
We also try and ensure a work atmosphere in which officers do not shy away from discussing their problems either with seniors or with counterparts. When there is a requirement, psychiatric help is always available. The aim is to ensure that the pilot does not carry any stress baggage into the cockpit.
As told to Rekha Dixit
What it takes for a Navy pilot to get back into the cockpit after surviving an air crash | idrw.org
