India's Most Fearless 2

by Shiv Aroor

  ‘This was now a real in-flight emergency,’ says Gunadnya. ‘We immediately informed ground control that we had an undercarriage emergency and that we were looking at our options.’

  Gunadnya and Aditee took a deep breath, looking to each other for a moment. Both knew that an emergency of this kind had never happened in the Air Force. Both also knew that with fuel and time running out, they needed to battle it the only way pilots really can—solve one problem at a time, then move to the next.

  ‘Let’s fix this,’ Sqn Ldr Aditee said, still smiling. ‘Let’s take this one step at a time and fix this.’

  Eight years earlier, Aditee had dreamed of flying fighters, but had to settle for transport aircraft when she graduated from the Air Force Academy near Hyderabad, since rules stopped women from flying fighters. When journalists chatted with her about whether women would ever be allowed to fly fighters in the IAF, she had confidently declared, ‘Only a matter of time.’ She was dead-on. Five years later, the very same military flying academy that had no choice but to place Aditee in an An-32 cockpit would graduate its first batch of women fighter pilots after the government changed rules, opening fighter cockpits to women pilots for the first time.

  She wasn’t flying fighters like she had hoped to, but eight years into service as a Short Service Commission officer, Sqn Ldr Aditee was still living the dream, plunged, alongside the much larger number of male pilots, into the daily rigours of transport aviation, a stream she would quickly learn brought with it its own set of tough challenges. That morning, as she smiled to herself in the cockpit of the K-3060, wondering how she and the pilot were going to land a 20-tonne airplane without all its wheels down, she thought about that old familiar yearning for the thrill of aviation. And like the men on board with her, Sqn Ldr Aditee was fully aware that this could be her final landing.

  Except, they couldn’t land.

  ‘Looking back, I know that death was, in fact, a sure possibility,’ says Sqn Ldr Aditee. ‘But there was a lot of communication going on among all of us. All the crew members, the ATC, our CO too had come on RT. We were discussing everything. This kept the atmosphere in the cockpit very positive.’

  On the ground at Sulur, the base commander, Group Capt. R.C. Mohile, had rushed to the ATC tower to be in touch with the pilots of K-3060. He knew that it was a highly experienced crew in the aircraft now circling the base. As a proficient An-32 pilot himself, it would have seemed logical for him, an older and more experienced pilot, to guide the aircraft’s crew out of their increasingly critical situation. But years of established protocol stipulate that beyond exception, the captain of the aircraft in distress has the final word on the course of action. Group Capt. Mohile could talk to his crew, but he knew that the ultimate decision on what to do lay with young Flt Lt Gunadnya. As it happened, it was an enormously difficult decision.

  ‘How are the hydraulics doing?’ Mohile’s voice came in through the radio. Gunadnya quickly updated the senior officer on the aircraft’s mechanical status.

  The An-32’s Russian flight manual offered an emergency solution to the landing gear problem. It recommended that if any of the wheels failed to deploy, standard operating procedure would be to retract all wheels and land the aircraft on its belly. Before the actual touchdown, the crew needed to turn off the aircraft’s engines 50 feet above the ground. This, according to the manual, was to minimize the possibility of an impact fire.

  ‘So the manual told me to descend slowly, pull back my landing gear, switch off my engines at 50 feet, and kiss the ground,’ Gunadnya says. ‘Ground control reminded me that that’s what the Russians had recommended in such a situation.’

  Except, Gunadnya remembers thinking, if he switched off the engines at 50 feet, it was certain to him that the crew would all be dead that day.

  ‘Switching off both the engines simultaneously in the air at 50 feet seemed like a very bad idea,’ he says. ‘The aircraft would go out of control without engine power. If you switch off the engines, the An-32 becomes one big asymmetric mass of metal and it would become very difficult to control it. And everybody in it would die. It would be practically crashing the aircraft. This was my overwhelming sense.’

  A thirty-year-old pilot was basically about to toss a carefully crafted aviation safety manual into the dustbin. With voices from ground control reminding him of the manual’s prescription for the mid-air predicament, Gunadnya finally spoke out. Politely, but firmly, he told his crew as well as ground control that he disagreed with what the Russians had prescribed.

  Now, An-32s are trusty Cold War-era birds with strong bones and a reassuring ruggedness. That was one of the reasons why the safety manual actually recommended a last-ditch belly landing. The aircraft were tough. But it was the final 50 feet of descent with engines off that had led Gunadnya to dismiss the idea entirely. In those 50 feet, headwinds beating against an unpowered aircraft could easily throw it off course, sending it careening dangerously into the scrub.

  The alternative that Gunadnya was proposing was even scarier.

  ‘Everybody was trying to sort out the issue, but the aircraft was in my hands,’ says Gunadnya. ‘So I announced that we would land the aircraft on one wheel, and hold it up on that wheel for as long as possible.’

  If the aircraft were a tricycle, Gunadnya had basically recommended hitting the runway while doing a ‘wheelie’ on just the right wheel.

  A few seconds of silence followed from ground control as the words sunk in. To many in the ATC tower at Sulur, the young pilot had just ditched an admittedly dangerous but prescribed recovery mechanism in favour of what looked like certain suicide. Gunadnya turned to his crew, searching for the tiniest semblance of affirmation. Almost imperceptibly, the others nodded back.

  Let’s do this.

  Gunadnya’s ‘wheelie’ plan was an enormous risk. It would require a magical level of cooperation from several hundred mechanical parts of the aircraft landing precariously on a single wheel. And there would be no practice run. The crew of the K-3060 would have one single chance to get it right. The reason for that was another sharp irony in the air that day. The pilots had enough fuel to last at least 20 more minutes—plenty of time in the normal course to practise-land a few times, if necessary. But for the sort of landing that Gunadnya had decided on, they wouldn’t have a second chance. Therefore, they needed to empty their tanks to minimize the possibility of ending up in a big fireball on the ground. The An-32 doesn’t have a mechanism to jettison or eject fuel in emergencies, so the crew needed to keep flying until their tanks were nearly dry before they attempted their one shot at a single wheel landing.

  ‘There was consensus in the cockpit that we preferred not to die in a fuel fire,’ Gunadnya says. ‘Anything but a big fireball.’

  The K-3060 needed to stay in the air for another 18 minutes. Gunadnya put the airplane in a long circle around the base, burning off fuel and waiting till the tanks were nearly dry. From the cockpit window, the ‘X’ of Sulur’s two intersecting tarmacs glimmered under the hot afternoon sun. From the crowd that had gathered near the ground control tower, it was clear that the entire base had heard about the K-3060’s unprecedented predicament.

  From the ground, the base commander and a few other officers used binoculars to look up at the An-32 as it circled the base.

  ‘So he advised us what we should do and we told him what we planned to do,’ says Sqn Ldr Gunadnya. ‘We did not get a yes or no, but he’s in a position where he can’t give a yes or a no. My ground controllers were also awesome. They reassured us about everything. When we were flying, we could see that the whole Air Force station had gathered on the tarmac. All the safety services were lined up for any eventuality. It was in a controlled procedural manner, the way it is in the Air Force.’

  ‘It was a very disturbing sight,’ says an officer from the Soaring Storks squadron who was at the ATC tower that afternoon. ‘Hearing about it from Gunadnya and team was one thing. Seeing the aircraft fly by with just one la
nding wheel deployed was a shock to everyone who was watching. Many prayers went up in that moment.’

  Over those 18 minutes, Gunadnya wondered quietly to himself if he was making a mistake. He had overruled the rule book and chosen to ignore gentle words of advice from ground control, including those of the boss of the Sulur base. This was his call. His crew completely supported his decision. But he knew the decision was his alone.

  ‘Doubt can be a paralysing thing when you’re in a cockpit. It can disorient you,’ says Gunadnya. ‘But there was something inside me that was just totally sure that the path I had chosen was the way to go.’

  Sqn Ldr Aditee glanced over at the pilot.

  ‘In my mind, I was very clear that we were not going to die,’ she says. ‘For me, that day, death was never a possibility. It may be hard to believe and I do not have any explanation for this feeling. But I was very confident. And it was not that I was trying to show calmness.’

  ‘My co-pilot and I shared a very high comfort level. She trusted me completely,’ Gunadnya says. ‘A crew’s lives were in my hands. I couldn’t for a moment show fear or hesitation. If I did, it would spread to Aditee and the others. When the emergency first surfaced, Aditee had smiled and said, “Okay, this is new! Let’s fix it!” We were a great team.’

  Gunadnya worked to control any semblance of agitation that could have surfaced in his manner. Barely a few years into his service, he had been thrust into a difficult leadership position that involved keeping everyone’s emotions in control in the face of likely injury and possible death.

  ‘The fear of death cannot persist. You can’t sustain fear of death for an hour,’ says Gunadnya. ‘That old cliché is true. I saw my whole life pass before my eyes when we reached the point of no return. The others were stressed when I looked at them, because they didn’t have anything in their control. We’re from the same squadron, but in the aircraft, what can you do except trust your captain? We’re all personally connected. My crew reassured me and I reassured them.’

  Aditee’s voice cut through the pilot’s thoughts.

  ‘This is going to work,’ she said, sensing Gunadnya’s quiet tension. ‘Time for final approach.’

  The aircraft was now on its final minutes of fuel. The margin for error at this point was zero. The K-3060 made a loose final turn from the south-west and headed back towards the base, this time in slow descent from 800 feet. As the aircraft flew lower and slower, turbulence buffeted its frame unequally, since it was slicing through the air with one landing wheel down and another up.

  ‘We turned for the final and then gave a call for the final approach,’ says Gunadnya. ‘When we descend from 1000 to 800 feet, and then to 500 feet, we give a call. We usually say, “Three greens, landing clearance requested.” We only had two greens and one amber. The ground control noted our request for the record. They had never received a request to land in such circumstances before.’

  In 40 seconds, the Sulur runway loomed into view. Descending to 100 feet, the crew lowered the aircraft’s flaps to slow it down to about 250 kmph, the slowest it could fly for a landing. Gunadnya tightened his fists around the flight control stick and turned to look toward his co-pilot. Aditee gave him one final nod, then took the aircraft down to 50 feet.

  ‘My speed was 250 kmph. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was flying with mixed controls. And now, if one wheel is not there, that means that amount of drag is not there. So, to maintain the same flight profile, you have to apply rudders. There’s no autopilot capable of helping you land in such a situation,’ Gunadnya says.

  There was another reason for Gunadnya’s decision not to switch off the engines at 50 feet, as prescribed by the Russian flight manual.

  ‘We needed to reduce the aerodynamic forces on the aircraft at slow speed and increase drag as much as possible,’ Gunadnya says. ‘We needed the engines on because we needed to “fine” the propellers to increase the aircraft’s drag. Therefore, there was no question of switching off the engines as prescribed by the Russian manual. I needed the advantage of drag. Switching off the engines would kill my drag, and the momentum of the aircraft would have thrown it out of control. Drag was our friend. And we needed every ounce of it.’

  On any other day, Gunadnya would have had the luxury of touching down further along the runway, even near the middle, since the An-32 didn’t need a lot of length to slow down after landing. But on this day, if there was one overwhelming certainty, it was that once K-3060 touched down, it was only a matter of moments before it would veer off the runway. If Gunadnya landed the aircraft too far down the runway, he ran the risk of the aircraft running off the track and ploughing into air base buildings or even the parked aircraft to the left. If the aircraft was going to veer off to the left, it needed to be into the open area filled with red earth near the beginning of the runway.

  Twenty feet above the ground, Gunadnya and Aditee could see the full runway before them, the flashing lights of crash vehicles far in the distance. A final prayer went up before the crew took the K-3060 to the tarmac.

  ‘Landing was the most difficult part,’ remembers Sqn Ldr Aditee. ‘We had spent a lot of time in air. And we had rehearsed the entire procedure. Now there was no turning back.’

  From ground control, a video camera filmed the aircraft’s approach. Officers present remember the cold silence that descended on the tower and the crowd below as the K-3060 descended the final few feet to the runway on its right wheel. The crew’s singular aim was to bring the aircraft down on the tarmac’s centre line with the aircraft’s nose up and to control it against all the physical forces that would begin to act on it.

  Seconds later, the wheel touched the tarmac. A collective gasp went up from the crowd as the aircraft shivered unsteadily for a moment.

  ‘We could not believe what we were seeing. For a few seconds, the aircraft was on one wheel. It was moving at 250 kmph on one single wheel,’ says an Air Force Sergeant who had been deployed at the far end of the tarmac to film the landing.

  In the cockpit, Gunadnya was leaning forward, his face a grimace of concentration as he fought to hold the aircraft steady while it screamed down the runway, dangerously balanced on one wheel.

  ‘As we roared forward on one wheel after touchdown, there was immediate danger,’ Gunadnya says. ‘The cantilever beam of the An-32’s wings could have turned viciously 180 degrees. It could have broken or toppled over. Anything could have happened in those very tense moments. I was using every bit of my strength to steady the aircraft as much as possible.’

  The aircraft screamed down the runway. But as drag began to kick in and shake the aircraft dangerously off its path, Gunadnya shouted to his co-pilot to ‘withdraw’ the propellers.

  ‘Two seconds after touchdown, I felt myself losing control of the aircraft,’ says Gunadnya. ‘I could not hold it because as the air speed forces reduced, the ability to control it was gone. Like trying to steer a stationary car. Aditee had withdrawn the propellers. There was nothing more we could do now but hope for the best.’

  Control of the aircraft was out of Gunadnya’s hands now. For 5 full seconds, the K-3060 shuddered precariously down the runway on its right wheel as the crew battled to keep it steady and slow it down. And then it began to tilt dramatically, as predicted, to the left.

  ‘Kharche was flying very well. He was doing a great job. I was following him on controls,’ says Sqn Ldr Aditee.

  Gunadnya remembers, ‘I had briefed the whole crew that the moment we crash, the flight engineer will jump out of the emergency exit first, followed by the navigators, Aditee and, finally, me. The emergency exit on the An-32 is a small square opening, large enough for barely one person.’

  As the aircraft veered with a roar off its course and off the runway into open shrubbery, Gunadnya sent up one final prayer. If the remnants of fuel did spark a fire now, the crew would have just seconds to get out of the aircraft—if the fire didn’t cut off their exit entirely, that is. The crash tender trucks
would still take at least 2 minutes to safely approach the aircraft.

  His hands still clutching the aircraft controls even if there was nothing more he could do, Gunadnya watched in horror as the K-3060 careened to its left, its wing tip hitting the runway in a flash of sparks, turning the aircraft now violently to the left and into the muddy scrubland off the tarmac. The aircraft thudded on for 50 more feet before it finally came to a stop.

  Gunadnya immediately received word on his radio that three crash tenders were speeding towards the aircraft. Both Flight Engineer Shailendra and a voice from ground control confirmed that, miraculously, there were no visible fires. Switching off all the aircraft’s systems, Gunadnya gave the order for his crew to exit the aircraft from the emergency slot.

  ‘Nobody said a word for the first few minutes,’ Gunadnya says. ‘We exited the aircraft in silence. Then we walked a few feet away and turned back to look at the plane. It was sitting on its belly, its left wing touching the ground.’

  Almost immediately, Gunadnya’s mobile phone rang. It was his wife, Shruti. She had chosen to remain in Mumbai at their family home while her husband was deployed with the Soaring Storks in Sulur. Gunadnya heard an anxious voice as he took the call.

  ‘Where are you? I’ve been calling you for so long. Your sortie should have been over by this time. What happened?’ Shruti asked. Her husband chuckled gently into his phone, assuring her that all was well. It would be days before Shruti would find out what he had managed to do that afternoon.

  After a medical team quickly attested that the crew had sustained no injuries, a pair of jeeps picked up Gunadnya and his team and transported them to a briefing room with the base commander and other senior squadron staff. Every last person at the Sulur base was sure they had witnessed history that afternoon. But they also knew how close the crew of the K-3060 had come to a fiery death. The Air Force would need to dive deep into every second of what happened in the air. It would check every bolt, every wire on board the K-3060. And it would investigate Gunadnya’s own leadership in the cockpit to judge whether his decision to disobey a flight manual was worthy of praise or punishment. But for the rest of the day, after the crew had logged their flight and changed out of their olive-green overalls, ruthless process would have to make way for some welcome revelry.