Plane Hits Bird

A headline on Wednesday read, ‘AI flight suffers bird-hit; cancelled, none hurt’. When we read about bird-hits affecting flights, we think about schedules gone awry.

But there’s more to a pilot-aircraft-bird relationship, especially in single-engine fighter-planes of the Defence Services. A fire, a loss of power, a malfunctioning of the instruments or a problem with fuel can give a warning to an aircraft.  But a bird hit can’t always. Several tons of the craft flying at mind-boggling speeds have a momentum so great that a four-kg vulture can shatter to smithereens on impact a thirty-crore machine. Needn’t add that the pilot and bird don’t survive unless the former, his skills trained and honed to perfection, ejects.

Perhaps worse is when an aircraft goes into spin. That means it yaws, pitches and rolls, all at once. That means the nose moves up and down and sideways simultaneously and the wings do exactly the same thing but at ninety degrees to it. The human being inside the cockpit is churned by all kinds of physical forces in all directions, making it almost impossible for him to think, react or move.

All the while he’s hurtling towards terra firms. Some survive this to tell the tale. Someone very close to me did.

It was a morning sortie, somewhere in the desert, when his aircraft went into a spin. All instincts geared to eject but at first attempt, nothing happened. Again the palm curled around the handle, the fingers pressed and the arms pulled, all muscles and nerves screaming with the effort and at barely over a kilometre above the ground, within a fraction of a second the canopy jettisoned. The seat and he were catapulted, somersaulting at several times the speed of the (now crashed) aircraft.

The small parachute tugged at the big parachute which, once positioned, gave him a jerk that brought him to his senses and could have snapped his spine. As the strong breeze carried him away from the crash site, he wished he could somehow rewind it all. But, ‘the moving finger writes and having writ moves on’. The labourers in the fields gathered around him as he lay, knowing well that the search party would be combing the scape via air and road looking for him.

It took over an hour to reach him, for he had cruised many miles away on the strong air currents.

When informed, military families don’t know what to expect. Perhaps years of providing solace to others in their times of need gives them the necessary strength not to give in to the cold clammy fear that grips the torso and limbs. There’s much we can learn from them.

I don’t know why or how this pilot wasn’t injured. Plain luck maybe. Some say his own deeds paid dividends, some say his dead ancestors played a role; some say his mother’s prayers worked. What I do know is that those who folded and packed the parachutes, who checked the equipment, the company that made it, and those who trained him did that task painstakingly, correctly. To them went everyone’s grateful thanks.

No injury doesn’t always mean all is well. It still means many days of immobility in bed. The physical trauma takes a long time to heal. To move his neck this pilot had to clutch his hair and get someone to raise his head gently, smoothly and slowly for he couldn’t bear to have his skull touched. All movement hurt.

Day and night he stared at the ceiling answering the grilling, probing questions of the Court of Inquiry. The investigations needed facts, numbers, calculations… all had to be provided from the bed.

Then the landline began to ring in the pilot’s house. Anxious calls came in from Hashimara. Yellahanka, Avantipur, Naliya, Uttarlai, Kalaikunda, all wanting to know he was. (Am googling right now to see where these places are, not familiar names in Goa.) Mobile phones and emails were decades away when this incident took place. Until only a few years ago, concern was transmitted through cards, letters and telegrams. Today, it’s instant. Speed of communication is a major thing that’s changed.

Each night when he downed his painkillers, he knew that in many, many homes in remote inaccessible corners of India, in Mess rooms and verandahs, drinks would be poured and a toast raised to a mate who had lived to make another landing. This tradition is still alive.

          All aircraft-chaalaks fear birds. Is vica-versa true?

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