by Shiv Aroor
A large cake was wheeled into the mess that night as the base celebrated the ‘rebirth’ of the crew of K-3060.
‘We were elated. There’s a tradition that if you survive an aircraft accident without injury, you celebrate a birthday. A rebirth, really. We cut the cake and there was a huge party that night. There was joy, but also a sense of disbelief that we were safe. It was unreal for both us and those who had received us,’ Gunadnya says.
Gunadnya’s deadly tribulation in the air may have ended miraculously without damage to life or limb—or even much damage to the aircraft itself—but when the sun rose the following day, he was about to receive a heavy reality check in the form of orders for a Court of Inquiry. This was due process, but on the line would be the young pilot’s fledgling career. Gunadnya had been in service just over five years.
An Air Marshal-rank officer, the chief of the Southern Air Command headquartered in neighbouring Kerala, landed in Sulur early on the morning of 7 February, kicking into motion an accident investigation the likes of which the IAF had never handled before. For a whole month, Gunadnya would be summoned to provide detailed testimony and a defence of his actions in the cockpit. He would be cross-examined and interrogated so the Court of Inquiry could draw up a complete, detailed picture of what had happened on board the K-3060. Ten days into the inquiry, Gunadnya was permitted to fly again.
‘They basically had to judge whether I was right or wrong. They needed to fix some learnings for the future. And I was at the centre of what happened. Thankfully, the Court of Inquiry gave me a tentative green light to fly after ten days,’ says Gunadnya. ‘This did not mean that I was in the clear, by any means, but simply that as a pilot, I was allowed to continue my daily flying duties.’
The Court of Inquiry interviewed the other members of Gunadnya’s crew, officers who manned the Air Traffic Control at Sulur and senior officers from the Soaring Storks squadron. When the inquiry was complete, Gunadnya waited for their judgement.
‘I was expecting trouble. I had deviated from established procedure, but hadn’t violated any norms. It was complicated. I ignored the Russian procedure and did what I thought was best. I explained my decision to the best of my abilities. But I was aware that deviating from tried-and-tested procedures is no joke. And no matter, a very serious view can always be taken. I could be in a lot of trouble,’ Gunadnya says.
Three days after the Court of Inquiry ended, Gunadnya was headed out of the flight operations room towards the flight line for another sortie, when he received a call on his mobile phone. It was Group Capt. Mohile, the base commander.
‘Good news and bad news, Kharche,’ Mohile said. ‘Which one do you want first?’
‘Bad,’ Gunadnya said. ‘Always bad first, Sir.’
‘Okay, the Court of Inquiry has concluded that the decision you took in the cockpit wasn’t the correct procedure,’ Mohile said.
Gunadnya stopped in his tracks, thunderstruck. Were they really going to bring the axe down on him? After all that?
‘And there’s good news after that, Sir?’ he asked.
‘The Court has recommended no action against you. You’re in the clear. Congratulations. Have a safe flight,’ Mohile said. The Court of Inquiry, as it happened, would make highly nuanced conclusions about the K-3060 incident.
What Gunadnya didn’t know was that other wheels had quietly begun to turn, between the Sulur base, the Southern Air Command and the Air Force Headquarters in Delhi. The K-3060 incident had become a hot topic of conversation among aviators and the IAF’s senior leadership. By the end of March, despite the Court of Inquiry ruling that the captain of K-3060 hadn’t followed established procedure, Flt Lt Gunadnya’s name was recommended for a Shaurya Chakra, India’s third-highest peacetime gallantry award.
‘The Air Force still maintains the diktat that the flight manual is our Bible and that I should have followed it. The rationale was that every other pilot hereafter will have doubts about procedure and instead apply his or her own mind. The Air Force was very mature in making a decision of this kind, and yet awarding me for the decision I took,’ Gunadnya says. ‘They saw merit in what I had done in my situation. They deemed it worthy of reward.’
Weeks later, Gunadnya would be part of an IAF team visiting Ukraine to inspect the An-32 upgrade programme that had been contracted in 2009. While there, he would get a chance to speak to the Antonov company’s test pilots.
‘We had a philosophical talk. They agreed with me, mostly,’ says Gunadnya. ‘They said manuals exist, sure, but when you sit in an aircraft, your decisions are over and above the flight manuals—always. They told me what I did was probably the better way to do it.’
Sqn Ldr Aditee has since retired from the IAF and now lives in Pune. The video of that landing remains on her phone, and she looks at it often.
‘Most of the time, aircraft emergencies require immediate action. Like in the case of engine fire or engine failure. The crew has to complete the actions without even thinking. To prepare ourselves for such emergencies, we practise a lot,’ she says. ‘However, our situation was very different from this. We had to spend a lot of time in air. We had to burn maximum fuel and land with minimum weight. We had never really practised something like this. In this type of scenario, all the crew members had to be in the situation for longer duration. If someone panics, there are chances of the situation going out of control. So it was very important to maintain calmness in the cockpit. Kharche and I kept flying alternately to avoid stress and fatigue. We kept talking with each other and with the ATC. I kept asking our flight engineer to keep calling out engine parameters, to keep carrying out visual checks. The navigator kept watch on fuel and aircraft endurance. This was just to keep everyone occupied. This was a very different and unique situation we were put in. But in the end, teamwork is the most important thing.’
Meanwhile, there was the question of damage to the aircraft itself. The K-3060 had taken an obvious beating as it had landed on one wheel and veered off the runway into muddy no-man’s land. But the aircraft had sustained surprisingly little real damage. Test pilots from Kanpur flew down to Sulur to conduct an elaborate check of the aircraft’s stress points and mechanical systems. With some minor tinkering at Sulur, the aircraft was flown to Kanpur for more detailed structural testing. Months later, it returned to service.
‘It’s an amazing aircraft. I actually flew that same aircraft later when I was deployed for a UN Peacekeeping mission in Africa,’ Gunadnya says.
Six months later, on India’s Independence Day, Flt Lt Gunadnya, who had by then been promoted to the rank of Squadron Leader, arrived in Delhi to receive his Shaurya Chakra gallantry decoration from the President of India. The citation would recount his actions on board the K-3060:
Flt Lt G.R. Kharche carried out a safe emergency landing with only starboard main wheel and nose wheel. The aircraft landing was controlled in the most courageous way and the aircraft suffered minimal damage. After landing, the action to evacuate the personnel on board were carried out most efficiently under his supervision. Flt Lt G.R. Kharche displayed qualities of exceptional courage and extreme professionalism during handling of such a grave emergency inspite of limited experience. His actions not only saved the lives of personnel onboard but also recovered the aircraft with minimal damage. For the display of exemplary courage and composure in handling an extremely rare emergency, Flight Lieutenant Gunadnya Ramesh Kharche has been awarded Shaurya Chakra.
‘I can never forget that there were two things that happened that day. We brought the K-3060 down safely,’ says Gunadnya. And the other?
‘And the K-3060 had also brought us down alive.’
1 See India’s Most Fearless 1 (New Delhi: Penguin Random House India, 2017).
1 The buddy system, which dates back to World War II, places officers and soldiers into pairs to enhance efficiency, bonding and lethality in combat. The system is based on the theory that camaraderie will amplify safety and combat effectiveness.
2 Bangus Valley in Kupwara district is a stunningly picturesque sub-valley at 10,000 feet, rich in animal and plant life and sprawling sun-kissed meadows in the mountains. But for the security situation, this would count as an effortlessly beautiful tourist destination. Efforts are now on to build more infrastructure there.
3 Nallahs are mini tributaries of rivers, more like small streams, common across Kashmir. They are commonly used by infiltrators as pathways for undetected movement.
1 A temporary breast-high fortification constructed with stones and sandbags. The term is understood to have been used first by the British Indian Army in the nineteenth century.
1 For a counter-terror operation in Naugam in 2016, Havildar Hangpan Dada of 35 RR would be posthumously decorated with the country’s highest peacetime award, the Ashok Chakra. An account of his mission is in India’s Most Fearless 1 .
2 Part of the Indian Army, the Territorial Army serves as a second line of defence, drawing its stock from civilians with elements from the regular Army. The 164 Infantry Battalion draws troops and officers from the Naga Regiment and is headquartered in Zakhama, Nagaland. As a ‘home and hearth’ battalion, it is intended to keep local youth from joining separatist terror outfits, while also directly operating against those outfits.
3 The S.S. Khaplang faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN[K]) is a banned terror outfit operating across states in the North-east. In 2015, the group unilaterally abrogated a fourteen-year ceasefire, going on to mount major attacks across Nagaland and Manipur. A June 2015 cross-border operation by the Indian Army Special Forces to destroy NSCN(K) camps, as revenge for an ambush a few days before in Manipur, is detailed in India’s Most Fearless 1.
4 The NSG is a Special Forces unit under India’s Home Ministry. The Special Action Group of the NSG draws its forces from the Army, and is primarily a counter-terrorist force with specialization in counter-terror operations in built-up areas, anti-hijack operations, hostage rescue and bomb disposal missions.
1 The layers of ‘work-up’ are indicative of how delicate and difficult submarine operations are. The myriad procedures that must align for successful and safe operations require constant checks and balances, since even small deviations or violations can mean disaster in the deep sea. In December 2018, the Indian Navy commissioned its first deep-submergence rescue vehicle (DSRV), a mini submarine designed to rescue the crew of submarines in distress.
2 https://www.indiannavy.nic.in/content/accident-onboard-ins-sindhuratna
1 The first and only official account of the 2016 surgical strikes is in the first part of India’s Most Fearless 1 , published by Penguin Random House India in 2017.
2 https://bit.ly/2EUxOe8
1 The collective lever in a helicopter controls the angle of the main rotor blades, and causes the helicopter to ascend or descend.
1 The Well of Zamzam is a well inside the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. Islamic mythology says that the well appeared by way of a divine miracle to bring forth water from God. The well is visited, and its water consumed annually, by millions of pilgrims during the Hajj or Umrah.
1 Intrusions, while rare, are far from unlikely. In August 1999, shortly after the Kargil war, a Pakistan Navy Atlantique-2 maritime reconnaissance aircraft that repeatedly violated Indian airspace off the Gujarat coast was shot down over the Rann of Kutch by an Indian MiG-21 jet.
1 The only first-hand account of the 2016 surgical strikes, by the Major who led them, is in India’s Most Fearless 1 . At the time of the publication of this book, the account is also being produced as a major web series.
2 See Chapter 9 .
3 Every Indian Army infantry battalion has a ‘Ghatak platoon’, comprising men trained in special operations and reconnaissance. It is often this platoon that leads offensive operations as ‘shock troops’.
4 The word ‘misadventure’ would be used by the Army Chief, Gen. Bipin Rawat, days after taking office in December 2016, and would be repeated several times the following year.
5 No troops are dispensable in any sense, but in mission planning, an expected casualty count is realistically considered to enable pragmatic, objective-oriented decisions.
Acknowledgements
In the nearly two years since we wrote the first India’s Most Fearless , it has become plainly clear that this is no longer just a book series. When we hear from readers across the world every day, we’re constantly reminded that these stories have a life of their own beyond the written page.
For this second book in the series, we wish to thank, above all, the chiefs of our three armed forces—General Bipin Rawat, Air Chief Marshal Birender Singh Dhanoa and Admiral Sunil Lanba. They saw how readers received the first in the series and were even more generous to our inquisitive pursuits with the second. Our deepest thanks especially to Major General A.K. Narula and his team at the Additional Directorate General of Public Information (ADGPI), Group Captain Anupam Banerjee and Captain Dalip Kumar Sharma.
Our gratitude to Swati Chopra, our editor at Penguin Random House, who, like us, has been drawn irreversibly into the lives of the heroes you read about in this book.
Our families—Torul, Tavleen, Aryaman, Agastya and Mira—and our parents who literally provide the world necessary to write such a book.
Thank you to our dearest friend Sandeep Unnithan, a powerhouse of information and talent that we are so proud is now a part of India’s Most Fearless.
To officers and soldiers, Special Forces men and doctors beyond counting who helped in ways small and big, who cannot be named for reasons operational. You know who you are and what you’ve done for this book.
Our thanks to our readers who’ve received India’s Most Fearless with an unending store of love and praise—even now, we forward your messages of love to the heroes and their families. We can’t wait to do the same with this book.
It is to that latter—the heroes and their families—that we give thanks above all. Nothing continues to astonish us more than the graciousness, generosity and modesty of men and women who’ve accomplished things beyond common understanding. As we tell the heroes or those they leave behind, the best way we can say thanks is to never stop writing.
THE BEGINNING
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Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com .
This collection published 2019
Copyright © Shiv Aroor and Rahul Singh 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Ahlawat Gunjan
This digital edition published in 2019.
e-ISBN: 978-9-353-05568-4
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