India’s Most Fearless: True Stories of Modern Military Heroes

by Shiv Aroor

  Early on 22 May, the base received word that 2 Pakistan Navy warships were expected to transit southward through the Arabian Sea, possibly in preparation to escort the brand new Zulfiquar back to Karachi a few weeks later.

  Snooping on each other’s ships in the Arabian Sea has been standard operating procedure for India and Pakistan for decades. So the ‘search and surveillance shadow’ mission that Lt. Cdr Yadav and his crew were tasked with that May morning was not much more than routine. But volatility in relations between the two countries post-26/11 meant that even routine surveillance missions carried substantially greater risk.

  The aircraft Lt. Cdr Yadav and his crew would be flying that day was IN305, a Soviet-era Ilyushin Il-38, a large ocean-surveillance aeroplane with 4 turbo-propeller engines. Fitted with advanced sensors to detect ships and submarines, this eye-in-the-sky aircraft can also fire torpedoes to destroy submarines or missiles to sink ships.

  The Il-38 is little known or recognized beyond the military and the world of aviation enthusiasts. It is not a particularly arresting sight. And being tucked away at the Goa naval air station has helped to maintain a low profile that suits its typically classified surveillance duties. In 2002, however, the Il-38 entered public consciousness in a devastating manner when 2 aircraft collided mid-air over Goa during a flying display to celebrate the squadron’s silver jubilee. Twelve Navy personnel perished in the freak tragedy. Lt. Cdr Yadav could well have been on board one of the doomed planes. It was something he would never forget each time he strapped himself in before a flight, just as he did 7 years later, that morning in May.

  After a brief chat with his navigator and systems operators, Lt. Cdr Yadav and the rest of his 8-man crew clambered into their Il-38 through a hatch in the aircraft’s belly—the aircraft has no other entry points. The 2 pilots strapped themselves into their seats in the cockpit. A flight signaller and a flight engineer took their seats in a small space behind the pilots. And in a cabin in the rear, 4 navigators cum sensor and systems operators sat at their electronic consoles. The crew’s mission that morning was to fly straight to a patch of ocean where they expected to encounter a pair of Pakistan Navy warships—a tanker and an armed frigate—identify both and gather as much information as possible about them, including their visuals and electromagnetic signatures.

  In a routine surveillance mission, Lt. Cdr Yadav and his crew would have had authorization to ‘buzz’ the Pakistani warships—swoop down low and make it obvious that they had been spotted, a maritime equivalent of ‘Gotcha!’, part of the endless cat-and-mouse chase at sea. But during this mission, the crew only needed to locate and shadow the Pakistani warships. Under no circumstances would the crew put the aircraft in any danger. Pakistan Navy warships were known to be fitted with Chinese-built surface-to-air missile systems capable of easily hitting an aircraft as big and slow as an Il-38.

  With permission to depart on that blazing hot morning, Il-38 IN305 roared off the Dabolim tarmac and climbed out over the Arabian Sea, heading due east towards its target. On board the aircraft, all systems reported normal. While the 2 pilots gently eased the aircraft higher, the navigator and operators made preparations for the mission objectives, corroborating their map coordinates and tuning up their sensors, which they would switch on only when they were close to the 2 Pakistani warships.

  On board the plane, the crew wore intercom headsets to communicate with each other and with ground control. Without the headsets, the Il-38’s 4 Ivchencko AI-20M propeller engines would drown out every other sound in the cockpit and cabin. Even a pressurized, reinforced cabin could only keep so much of the sound out.

  The crew checked in with ground control, indicating that they were now over the high seas. An hour had passed. The Il-38 was flying at 21,000 feet over deep, blue ocean, about 550 km off the coast of Goa.

  The flight navigator signalled to the crew that they were now very close to their target, alerting the mission systems operators to get ready for the task. But as the crew prepared to descend slightly and begin its shadowing mission, they felt a small shudder pass through the 70-tonne aircraft.

  It took Lt. Cdr Yadav a few seconds to realize what had happened. And it couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time.

  The Il-38 had 8 electric generators providing power to virtually every system in the aircraft. Like a pack of dominoes, each generator abruptly sputtered and died. In a matter of seconds, the entire aircraft was stripped of electrical power, and every single one of its systems was suddenly suspended right before they were needed the most. But it was not just the mission that had been jeopardized by stalled equipment. The very lives of those 8 men now hung in the balance.

  Lt. Cdr Yadav instantly realized that he and his crew were sitting on a ticking time bomb. Oil fed into the engines was controlled electrically. So was the temperature of the oil. When the generators failed, the oil-cooler shutters got stuck and couldn’t be moved since they were electro-mechanically operated. Lt. Cdr Yadav stared in horror at his dying cockpit instruments. He knew the ideal temperature of engine oil was 70 °C, with an emergency limit that stretched up to 100 °C. The gauges informed him that the oil temperature in the engines had crossed 150 °C. It was very simple. The 4 screaming engines could explode at any moment.

  The aircraft now completely stripped of electrical power, and the cockpit and cabin lit by the red glow of a solitary emergency lamp, the pilots lost engine indicators, crucial data necessary to keep the aircraft safe and not turn into a ball of fire hurtling into the Arabian Sea.

  With all instruments either dying or dead, Lt. Cdr Yadav took his partner’s altimeter—his own was electrically powered and rendered useless.

  ‘I had no navigation, no communication and limited control over my engines. I was doing my best not to touch the throttles. I knew that a single abrupt move could cause the engines to explode,’ Lt. Cdr Yadav remembers.

  The engines weren’t the only things screaming on board IN305. With their intercom headsets now rendered useless, the men on board had to literally scream instructions at each other to be heard.

  The crew of IN305 had few friends in the air that afternoon, and many adversaries. Starting with the generators, virtually everything turned against them in a chain reaction of terrifying circumstance. Every minute brought with it a fresh piece of reality that pushed the crew ever closer to giving up.

  The Il-38, built for extended missions over sea, was full of fuel that morning—26 tonnes of aviation kerosene for the 4 hungry engines. The mission commanders at Goa had wanted to give the aircraft crew enough endurance and range to shadow the Pakistani warships adequately before returning to base. That mission, of course, had now gone straight out of the window.

  The one thing Lt. Cdr Yadav knew he needed to do was descend so he could allow the navigator to get his bearings. But there was a dilemma. Diving to a lower altitude meant feeding the engines thicker air, which could put an additional strain on them and accelerate a disaster. Lt. Cdr Yadav waited, making a series of rapid calculations in the air—something he had learnt to do as a young Lieutenant.

  Using the artificial horizon, a thankfully analogue instrument that tells pilots the orientation of their aircraft relative to the earth’s horizon, Lt. Cdr Yadav took charge and gently steered IN305 towards India’s west coast. In his lap was an emergency compass, the size of a rupee coin. Every other navigational aid was dead. With the gentlest possible touch he could muster for a large aircraft that had nothing gentle about it, Lt. Cdr Yadav pushed it into slow descent to about 7000 feet. As the aircraft lumbered uncertainly through the thicker air, Lt. Cdr Yadav looked out of his side window at the whining propellers. Then he looked over at the younger pilot next to him, and the other men standing behind him. He knew he had to do it.

  ‘I briefed the crew in no uncertain terms. I told them that if the engines started exploding, we had no choice but to bail out. No thinking twice, on my command, we would jump out through the aircraft’s belly hatch with our parachu
tes over the sea,’ Lt. Cdr Yadav recalls.

  Jumping out of an Il-38 was a daunting proposition. Unlike other aircraft that had rear ramps or exit doors that were clear of the aircraft’s propellers, exiting from the belly hatch of IN305 would send the crew careening through space between the 2 inner propellers on both wings. A tiny bit of abrupt turbulence could send them head first into the equivalent of a giant blender. There would be nothing left of them.

  His crew stared back at him. He was the most experienced man on the plane. His word would be final. If he ordered them to jump, that was precisely what they would do. There was no doubt in their minds. What they would do once they landed with their parachutes in the middle of the Arabian Sea was a problem they would tackle once they got to it.

  The crew waited. Every one of the 8 men hoped they wouldn’t need to exit the aircraft over the ocean.

  A set of 4 emergency batteries on board the aircraft were in a precarious state after the generators perished, but still had a few wisps of voltage left. Lt. Cdr Yadav picked up his high-frequency radio transmitter and beamed out a message he hoped would be caught by airliners in the surrounding airspace. The emergency battery indicators suddenly plummeted to near zero, ruling out that last vestige of communication with the outside world. A minute later, the batteries were dead too. IN305 was now 100 per cent bereft of any direct or stored electrical power.

  ‘We were flying by the seat of our pants and hoping to make it back. The worry for me was, if we make it back, how do we land?’ says Lt. Cdr Yadav.

  An Il-38 that had finished its mission and expended its heavy load of fuel was automatically rendered light enough to land safely. But without the ability to dump fuel off the aircraft, the crew of IN305 was locked into what was a veritable missile. Lt. Cdr Yadav wiped his brow with the back of his hands. About 450 km off the coast, he lowered the aircraft’s wheels, a hydraulic process.

  A fresh dilemma presented itself. And Lt. Cdr Yadav knew he had bare minutes to make a decision.

  ‘With all our fuel on board that we couldn’t get rid of, we were 18–20 tonnes heavier than permissible landing weight. The wings had flaps to lower the approach speed, but wouldn’t budge an inch without electrical power,’ he says.

  A safe landing speed on the Il-38 is no more than 200 kmph. Without his flaps to slow the aircraft down, IN305 would hurtle towards the runway at 300 kmph, an unacceptably high speed. As if a dangerously heavy, unacceptably fast and almost uncontrollable aircraft coming in for a landing was not enough for the crew to deal with, they also had to contend with the fact that it was pre-monsoon season. The runway at Goa’s Dabolim airfield was soaked with rainwater.

  ‘Everything was against us,’ Lt. Cdr Yadav recalls. ‘Everything.’

  For a brief moment, he brought up the possibility of ditching in water—the act of landing the plane in a controlled manner on the sea surface, and exiting rapidly in an inflatable boat. The navigator was asked to see if he could spot some ships for IN305 to ditch close to, so chances of a rescue would be quicker. Lt. Cdr Yadav hated the idea from the moment it left his mouth. He swallowed and waited for a few more minutes, holding the aircraft steady. Then he saw it.

  The west coast loomed into view through the weather haze. Glancing out of the cockpit, Lt. Cdr Yadav realized they were about to fly over Karwar in Karnataka, a town about 100 km south of Goa and home to one of the Indian Navy’s largest warship bases.

  IN305 was now over familiar territory. But that brought no comfort at all to the crew on board. If those engines exploded now, they were too low to bail out. And if they were forced to, it was land below them. Well past the point of no return, Lt. Cdr Yadav used both hands to mechanically steady the aircraft. Bereft of electrical power, the control column strained against every bit of pressure from the pilots. Every input was manual. The sweat dripped off the pilots’ faces as they fought to control the aircraft in its descent. Then, Lt. Cdr Yadav heard one of the men behind him yell something through the noise. He turned around to see one of the crew brandishing a mobile phone.

  ‘I grabbed the phone. By some stroke of luck, there was a mobile signal,’ Lt. Cdr Yadav recalls. The pilot used the mobile to call the Dabolim air traffic control, screaming into the phone a description of IN305’s situation and calling for full preparation on the ground for a possible disaster.

  Using the mobile phone on board was against procedure, like with civil flights. But Lt. Cdr Yadav knew it was his one lifeline in the event his aircraft hurtled down the Dabolim tarmac with a collapsed landing gear and in a ball of angry flame.

  Grimly aware of just how slim their chances were, Lt. Cdr Yadav and his crew steadied IN305 in its final seconds as the runway emerged through the haze. The engine roar increased as the temperature abruptly spiked, threatening to explode just a few feet off the ground.

  ‘I knew the engines could burst at any time. I shouted to the crew that we had only one chance to make it to the runway. This was do or die,’ he says.

  There was no turning back now. The crew of IN305 held its breath as the aircraft slammed down on the runway. Just seconds before it did, a fresh realization dawned.

  ‘I remembered we didn’t have hydraulics to stop the aircraft. So how do we control the speed? I couldn’t shut the engines down either, because they are electrically operated too,’ Lt. Cdr Yadav says. But there was a little-known last resort that he recalled out of nowhere.

  An emergency option had been designed into the Il-38 that allowed pilots to pneumatically ‘feather’ the engines, a method to decrease drag and stop the propellers. The option, though, was a terrible risk. The Il-38 has 4 engines, 2 on each wing. If even a single engine was feathered before the other, the aircraft could be thrown violently off its path and into a wreck of mangled metal and flame. Lt. Cdr Yadav looked to his flight engineer, directing him to pull the feathering levers at precisely the same moment.

  ‘We could have handled a small bit of yaw (oscillating movement on the vertical axis). But anything extreme would have meant the end of all of us,’ Lt. Cdr Yadav recalls.

  The feathering worked. As soon as IN305 touched the tarmac, Lt. Cdr Yadav rushed to switch off first the outer 2 engines and then the inner ones. And with one final vestige of hydraulic power that had built up in the dead aircraft, he controlled it on the tarmac’s centre line, wrestling to keep it from veering off the runway. Keeping IN305 on the runway was crucial not only to their own lives but the safety of other personnel and aircraft at Dabolim.

  After an unforgiving hour in the air, the crew of the Il-38 met their first friend: Dabolim’s unusually long runway, one of the longest in India, that gave the hurtling aircraft the extra distance it needed to slow down and stop without brakes.

  ‘Around 9000 feet after touchdown, the aircraft came to a stop. I could see the valley beyond the runway come into view. Luckily we were able to stop the aircraft,’ he recalls.

  The roar of the engines had died down, giving way to the sound of emergency sirens as a medical crew pulled Lt. Cdr Yadav and his men from the Il-38. It was only then, Lt. Cdr Yadav says, that he fully grasped what had just happened.

  ‘When you’re in the air, all you’re doing is solving the problem in front of you, first one, then the next. You’ve got no choice. You can’t see the big picture, only the problem in front of you,’ he says.

  That evening, after a mandatory medical check, Lt. Cdr Yadav made his way to his residence at the base. His wife and 2 young children were at home. The family had made plans to dine at the Naval Officer’s Institute that evening. But Lt. Cdr Yadav was exhausted. When he told his wife he’d prefer to relax at home, she wasn’t surprised. Her husband often came home tired after long airborne missions.

  It was only the next day, when she was asked by other families about the incident, that she learnt about what happened on board IN305.

  The crew of IN305 had flown raw, with all possible odds stacked against it. Three years later, when Lt. Cdr Yadav travelled to Russia on m
ilitary work, an old designer from the Ilyushin design house cornered him at an event to ask about the now-legendary flight. In rapt attention, the Russian listened, taking notes, amazed by how the Indian crew had saved themselves and their aircraft.

  A crucial mission to shadow Pakistani warships remained unfinished on that day. But the lives of 8 naval aviators had been saved by what the Indian Navy described as Lt. Cdr Niteen Yadav’s ‘high degree of maturity, composure and a sense of resolve in the face of impending peril’. A year later, his leadership on board IN305 won him the Shaurya Chakra.

  While IN305 was grounded for investigation into the failure that nearly doomed its crew, 4 days later, Lt. Cdr Yadav strapped into another Il-38 on an identical mission. This time, a pair of Pakistani warships was transiting the other way.

  The mission is reported to have been a success.

  10

  ‘We Follow That Man. He Has Seen Death’

  Captain Varun Singh

  Puttushahi, Jammu and Kashmir

  2 May 2000

  All that he remembers seeing, lying paralysed in that stretcher and slipping in and out of consciousness, was the blur of the Cheetah’s rotor blades as the tiny helicopter dashed through the airspace over the Kashmir valley. His chest had been ripped open by a hundred metal splinters. A handful of them had punctured his right lung, smashed his sternum and broken several ribs. Another had pierced his heart. His right arm hung from its skin. His thick beard was matted with drying blood, with more forming scarlet rivulets down his front, staining his assault vest and combat fatigues.