by Shiv Aroor
Very soon, visibility was zero. Flying 100 feet over the lashing sea surface, the SK 528 was completely blind. The crew couldn’t see more than a few feet beyond the helicopter’s windshields and the on-board sensors were tuned to hunting submarines, not finding wrecked fishing boats and survivors in the middle of a maelstrom. Thankfully, the crew had another pair of eyes flying far above them.
Cruising at 1000 feet through the storm clouds was an Indian Navy P-8I, a Boeing 737 aircraft fitted with an arsenal of high-performance sensors and cameras capable of penetrating the worst weather and finding the smallest objects at sea—something the Sea King, flying 900 feet below, could only dream of doing. A small, swivelling camera in a bubble-like container on the P-8I’s chin scanned the sea surface in infrared mode, while a team of officers on board scanned the visual feed, hoping to spot a fishing boat in distress.
Or even humans in the water, for that matter.
For 3 hours, the helicopter and the aircraft combed huge sections of the sea roughly 70 km off the Kerala coast. For 3 hours, they found nothing but a roiling sea getting steadily worse.
‘The P-8I crew and I knew that with each passing minute, spotting boats or survivors would become increasingly more difficult. But just as we were about to shift our attention to a different part of the sea to look for possible survivors, the P-8I’s commander came in through the radio,’ says Capt. Rajkumar.
‘Boat sighted. Capsized condition. Four survivors visually confirmed,’ the P-8I pilot called through the radio, relaying a set of coordinates to the precise location. Daylight was fading fast, but a target had been spotted and the helicopter’s crew wasted no time. Still flying at 100 feet, the Sea King banked hard as it changed direction and headed straight for the coordinates of the location where a medium-sized fishing vessel had turned over.
‘Unlike thirty or forty years ago, when catamarans and older fishing boats had deep bottom keels that were much more resistant to capsizing, new generation cheaper-to-build fishing boats with their fibreglass hulls are top-heavy, and therefore capsize easily in rough seas,’ says Capt. Rajkumar. It was an important nugget of information he had picked up on visits to fishing villages. Now, cruising over a thrashing sea, he knew it meant two things: one, that the time available to rescue the boat in distress was extremely short, and two, spotting them in the water was going to become exponentially more difficult as the minutes passed.
But this needle-in-a-haystack hunt had actually thrown up a target, thanks to the aircraft flying above them. Fully aware of how futile search and rescue operations could be without modern technology, Capt. Rajkumar sent up a silent prayer of thanks for the privilege of precise coordinates to home in on.
The dull grey daylight was fading fast, but as the Sea King swooped in over the coordinates they had locked on to, it was clear that the information supplied by the P-8I was of very high quality. There, bobbing in the sea, was a capsized fishing boat with four persons on top. Fortunately, all four appeared to be in good condition, suggesting that the boat had been out at sea for not more than a day.
‘We descended to about 30 feet. The weather was worsening. Our two divers lowered a rescue strop, and we winched the four men up one by one. This was, of course, a time-consuming job and time definitely was at a premium as there was not much daylight remaining,’ remembers Capt. Rajkumar.
With the four rescued fishermen on board, the crew of the SK 528 made straight for the coast. By the time the helicopter landed at Thiruvananthapuram with the survivors, it was well past sunset. A difficult mission had been flown with the unlikely bonus of actually finding and rescuing survivors during a cyclone at sea. It was time to switch the engines off and take a break for the night. For one thing, the P-8I that had provided rescue intelligence had flown back to base for the night. And without it, hunting for survivors was virtually impossible. It was a difficult day that had ended with success. There was no reason not to call it a night.
But something nagged at Capt. Rajkumar. And as the SK 528 was refuelled for the second time that day with its rotors still turning, the four other men on board waited for orders.
‘My crew understood fully. I did not have to say much. There were no orders or coordinates. We lifted off and headed out to sea for the second time on a hunch and a prayer for those yet to be rescued,’ the Captain remembers. ‘If there’s a very fine line between calculated risk and sheer foolhardiness, we in the military know there’s a very fine line between a court martial and a gallantry award.’
In the cabin, combat diver Deepak Saini read the Captain’s mind. And then he heard the words.
‘We will launch again and search for survivors till the last drop of fuel in our bodies as well as the machine are expended,’ the flight commander announced from the cockpit.
‘The Captain was determined that we would be angels to someone else that night. He was not ready to give up. And his words energized us afresh,’ says thirty-one-year-old Saini, who joined the Navy in 2004 and took the commando diving course in 2010, making him one of a rare breed of sailors tasked with one of the most death-defying mission profiles in the service.
Everything had changed off the coast of Kerala in the hour since the rescue of the four fishermen. The swirling grey of dying daylight had now turned into complete darkness. The only aids the crew had were floodlights and a single controllable spotlight on the helicopter’s chin.
‘Unfortunately, these lights, when switched on in heavy rain, will only reflect it back to the cockpit, making flying very disorienting. Flying at 200 feet, scanning the night sea in rain, is one of the most challenging tasks out there,’ Capt. Rajkumar says. With the sea and sky melting into one endless mass of blackness, the pilots of SK 528 were flying largely with the help of their instruments, most importantly at this time, a radio altimeter that reassured them of their height above the turbulent sea surface.
The SK 528 cruised through the darkness, the bad weather of earlier in the day now working up into an unrelenting viciousness of rain and wind, the endless darkness of the sea and sky only broken by the faint luminescence of waves in violent churn. For a helicopter crew, a more unfavourable set of flying conditions couldn’t be imagined.
‘We were hunting blind. We had no coordinates. And we couldn’t see. This was exponentially more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack,’ Capt. Rajkumar now remembers.
The bitter irony of the situation wasn’t lost on the crew. They were now searching for something they couldn’t see in the first place—and probably wouldn’t be able to see even if they flew right over it. But they stayed out over the sea, five men squinting through the darkness in every direction, hoping to see something, anything, combing stretches of inky black ocean on a hunch that there were more people out at sea and waiting to be rescued.
The endless combing of the sea continued for an hour without result. And as the winds picked up, it was clear to the crew that this mission was only getting more challenging. Capt. Rajkumar gathered his thoughts as his co-pilot took control of the helicopter and kept it on course for the search. And that’s when a voice with a heavy Chinese accent crackled in on the radio.
The nearly incomprehensible call, inflected with panic, was from a huge 1,00,000-ton Maltese container vessel, the MV Cosco Beijing , that had been making its way across the Arabian Sea. The message had come in through Channel 16, the 156.8 megahertz frequency used by merchant vessels. While refuelling at Thiruvananthapuram an hour earlier, Capt. Rajkumar had tuned one of the cockpit’s very high frequency (VHF) radios to Channel 16, thereby keeping an ear open for emergency messages from merchant ships. The anguished Chinese voice was distorted and high pitched.
‘BOAT! CAPSIZE! FISHING BOAT! CAPSIZE!’ came the call through Channel 16 from the MV Cosco Beijing . The ship was visible to the helicopter’s crew on their radar and had been identified. The call was the first miraculous confirmation to Capt. Rajkumar that his hunch had been correct. He immediately responded to the radio message, conf
irming that he was headed towards the ship.
Through a series of garbled exchanges deciphered while manoeuvring the Sea King through the cyclone, the crew of SK 528 understood that the MV Cosco Beijing had spotted a capsized fishing boat, and was using a laser pointer device to mark its location.
Co-pilot Lt Cdr Garud responded immediately, slowly relaying a message back to the merchant ship. ‘This is Indian Navy helicopter on a search-and-rescue mission. Information received on capsized boat. We are heading to your location.’
With the co-pilot in tenuous touch with the merchant ship, Capt. Rajkumar turned the chopper sharply in the vessel’s direction.
‘We picked up the massive merchant vessel on our radar and speeded towards it. Though the big ship had stopped, it was also rolling and pitching in the churning sea. Its only connection with the fishing boat it had spotted was with the laser pointer. There was no way it could come close to the fishing boat, because that would have been dangerous to any survivor. The safe distance coupled with the heavy rain meant the laser beam wasn’t quite reaching its intended target. The huge waves were also constantly hiding the boat. So the man on MV Cosco Beijing ’s deck was also, in effect, searching for the boat with his laser pointer,’ says Capt. Rajkumar.
Arriving within minutes over the huge container ship, the Sea King circled it a few times, its crew hoping desperately to find the tiny laser beam the ship was using to identify the general direction of the capsized boat it had spotted. The sea was so rough, it was very likely that the capsized boat had drifted considerably. But with the Indian Navy helicopter now buzzing over it in a desperate hunt for visual contact, the laser pointer remained switched on.
‘Normally, one would not fly this long in such conditions. We had been flying hands-on for 6 hours, without the luxury of autopilot. But in such missions, it’s adrenaline that keeps you going, and it’s mind over body. In retrospect, you feel you were fatigued, but in the moment, you’re not. Your mind is racing, with not a moment to spare,’ remembers Capt. Rajkumar.
The flight commander knew it would be much easier to spot the boat from the deck of the ship in these conditions than from a helicopter at 200 feet. The ‘slant visibility’ at this point was next to nothing over a black cauldron of a sea.
‘I had just been circling over the ship for 10–15 minutes, but the laser and the boat were simply invisible to us. We could see absolutely nothing as I manoeuvred the Sea King over the seas around the ship. And it was purely by chance that our navigator saw a flash of the green laser,’ he says.
‘Laser beam spotted on port bow, Sir!’ shouted navigator Lt Cdr Mayoor Chauhan. It was the elusive visual lock the crew had been hunting for. A single laser beam being pointed from the deck of the 1,00,000-ton Maltese container ship, 80 km off the coast of Kerala in the middle of one of 2017’s worst cyclones. A single little beam of green light was all that the SK 528 now had to depend on.
‘As a submarine hunter, the Sea King has the ability to hover low over the sea surface, but none of those manoeuvres applies in a scenario like this, where you have to slowly descend and depend on excruciatingly delicate hand-eye coordination. There is no autopilot flying here. It’s all manual,’ Capt. Rajkumar says.
‘At such low height, I had to constantly look out and then back at my instruments, because we were flying at very high angles of tilt. In a big helicopter like the Sea King, when you bank in excess of 30 degrees, you lose a lot of your lift power, so you have to compensate with collective power. Piloting becomes much more challenging. So there was no way I could completely ignore the instruments and look for the boat. It was half instrument flying and half visual flying.’
With the laser beam in their sights now, the helicopter swivelled around and headed straight for it, descending slowly. There was no time to lose, but a single hurried step could have meant certain death for the crew of the SK 528.
‘Normally, we don’t hover lower than 50 feet because there are various criteria that make this a risk, including lift performance and sea spray. In this case, there was no question of staying at 50 feet, because there was sea spray all around anyway. There was no way we could have done this rescue from 50 feet. So we kept descending slowly until we were at 20 feet, which is extremely low over the surface of a swelling sea. It was a constant up-and-down motion for us, because the whole sea would rise and then it would fall. We had to constantly maintain distance between the boat and the aircraft. I knew that if I was not careful with my collective 1 coming up on power, the sea swell could hit the helicopter tail rotor, which was my main worry, and this would have been catastrophic. We had to be extremely sharp while manoeuvring the chopper.’
At 20 feet, a bare whisker in flying terms from the violently undulating sea surface, Capt. Rajkumar finally spotted it.
‘It was an unreal moment. By sheer luck, I saw the boat. It had a blue fibreglass hull. And spread across the hull, holding on to a rope for dear life, was a solitary fisherman. From 20 feet above, it was clear that this man wasn’t moving,’ he remembers.
‘I knew if I lost sight of him for even a moment, it would be over. It was extreme, untamed flying, because we were just 20 feet above the boat, which was going all over the place. We didn’t know where the natural horizon was. There was the risk of the swell hitting the underbelly of the helicopter or hitting the tail rotor. In daytime, we have a small amount of horizon orientation between the sea and sky. At night, nothing. We could only fly with the reference we had. That was this boat. The boat was moving left, right, up, down, and if I flew looking only at the boat, then I would get disoriented and lose control of the aircraft too. I was looking at the instrument panel for less than a second, then at the boat. And if I looked too long at the instrument panel, I would lose the boat for sure. That’s the sort of flying we were doing out there.’
In a shuddering hover at that dangerously low altitude, Capt. Rajkumar collected his thoughts once again. The man on the boat wasn’t moving and hadn’t responded to the arrival of the helicopter above him. It was clear to the crew that the man was either unconscious or in shock. The horrifying realization also dawned that the man may have been out there for up to three days without water, food or a surface to stand on.
‘We realized, much to our dismay, that he was not ready to let go of the rope he had been clutching for at least the last three days. He was a defeated man, both physically and mentally.’
Diver Saini will never forget the moments that followed as he stared down at the boat, with a solitary naked fisherman holding on for life, glaring up with a mixture of yearning and uncertainty.
‘High waves and downwash were making the boat drift and making it difficult to hover above it. I suggested to the Captain that we winch down a diver—both of us [divers] were ready to take the risk. The proposal was not approved because of the risk to a diver’s safety in the open sea, and that too, on a dark night. The man was staring longingly at us as the last hope of his survival, while above him, discussions were going on about how to pick him up,’ Saini remembers.
But how could the crew rouse him?
‘There was no question of descending any lower. I was worried about the powerful downwash of our rotors throwing the man off the capsized hull. And if that happened, we would lose him for sure,’ Capt. Rajkumar says. His hands on the controls, eyes darting between his cockpit instruments and the man on his doomed boat, the flight commander fought to keep the Sea King in a steady hover.
The first of a series of terrible dilemmas presented itself.
‘You think with your mind, you use your logic, backed by knowledge and experience. But there’s that other sense which you get. That is often what helps you in a situation where you have to take a decision. If I had used my reasoning and logic, there’s no way I would have attempted what happened next. Because I knew the risks were huge. But I knew we had to. I just knew it,’ remembers Capt. Rajkumar.
But before the thought crossed the flight commander’s mind, one of the c
ombat divers seated in the helicopter’s cabin behind the cockpit shouted.
‘Main jaoonga , Sir (I will go, Sir)!’
It was Deepak Saini, the younger of the two divers. He already had his black diving suit on. The other diver, Sumit Raj, had prepared the winch and harness. The two young divers were awaiting orders.
‘I get emotional talking about it now, because there is disbelief that I even took that decision,’ remembers Capt. Rajkumar. ‘The most difficult decision for me was to send diver Saini down. It was the only way to attempt any rescue. There was no other way. Sending the diver down was a dilemma for me. He was a young man. I didn’t know if he knew the dangers involved. He may have volunteered in his innocence and enthusiasm for the mission. It was very easy for him to step forward. He may not have known the dangers, but I couldn’t be excused. I did know what those dangers were. It was a gut-wrenching moment for me as I took the decision to send him down. I had to look at the possibility of therefore losing two people at sea—the diver and the fisherman. I knew that if I sent him down, I might never see him again. If I had a small emergency on board—like an engine oil lubricant light coming on, or the rescue hoist not coming up properly, or a vibration developing in the helicopter—there would have been no way to pick up those two people in the water. I would have had to abandon them at sea. I cannot describe how enormous this risk was.’
Capt. Rajkumar hesitated for a moment, turning briefly to look at the two young divers behind him. But that moment of pause, born from a leader’s concern for the lives under his charge, dissipated when both co-pilot Garud and navigator Chauhan said taking the risk was the only option they had.
Turning back to his instruments, Capt. Rajkumar wasted no time.
‘Roger, lower the diver,’ called the flight commander, as he held the SK 528 in its shuddering hover, also issuing instructions to Saini to hold on to the boat after rescuing the fisherman and placing him in the strop harness.