Notes to Myself

I got a copy of Notes to Myself a long time ago. It came to me so long back that today I can scarcely recall my identity before it was altered in whatever little way that every book does by way of its thoughts.

What makes the book special to me is that it was gifted by a dear friend, in return for some help that I offered, or so I presume.

I had found my wings and could say with a fair amount of certainty that my rockets would send the white dust from the pin high enough to be seen in the periscope of the Biz. During those days of splendid glory, I had spent a few minutes more than one would normally sharing what I had learnt to him. All I did was share my passion, in whatever little way that I knew. I certainly was not a know it all, far from it. When you are free to roam the blue yonder, one minute more of experience could mean the experience of a lifetime. And I was willing to share if it would give any one that.

But today when I live another life, very distant from the one that I wanted, I want to read those few lines just once again. Today it's not to reminisce what I shared, but just to meet him just once more. Just once more before I bid another final good bye.

I bequeathed my wings out of my own folly, and have given up the glory that comes with it, but I guess I will forever bear the curse that comes with the wish of those glorious wings.

Lessons from my favourite Poem "IF"

Kipling said fill the unforgiving minute with sixty minutes minutes worth of run and the earth is yours to be. Little did I know that when I was busy filling the minute with sixty minutes worth of flight I was reaching out to touch perfection.
I learnt albeit, it was after a small fall, I had not dealt in lies even when I was being lied about. But I must confess for a brief moment, that did seem to last an eternity, I did give way to hating.
I realised that I had been given the gift of meeting disaster, and treating at least this one imposter with prudent judgement. As for triumph, I hope that it will bear down on me in small proportions that I can digest. Perhaps it has already started to do battle with me and at this moment I can say that I am winning just as I did with disaster.
I cannot help but thank my well wishers who guided me to make a heap of all my life's winning after eleven years and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss, and most importantly give me the confidence that I would never lose.
I must acknowledge the support of many of my contemporaries who heard the truth twisted by quacks to make a trap for fools, and did not believe in them, but stood by me to start all over again at the beginning. Ah and here I must mention all those fools too, who were trapped by the knaves. After all I learnt that I did many a times count a bit too much on friends!
I cannot help but thank my parents, who kept urging me to dream, and yet not make it my master.
I cannot help express my gratitude to the men who trusted me when I must confess there were moments when I did not trust myself. Many might say that they did not have anything to lose by trusting me with what they did, but I ask why did they have to, when they could have done without. They were and is still are I know ready to trust me with even more, if I ever need.
Most of all I cannot help but wonder about my mate who waited and amazes my by never being tired by waiting. She still continues to wait, till my dreams are fulfilled. I guess because she belives my dreams are as much hers.
In all these truimphs, disasters, lies, dreams, trusting & waits the words "Fighter Pilot is an attitude in life" too stood by me.

The Great Banana Skin

Strapped into the ejection seat of the Mig-21 fighter, late in the month of August, was a minuscule part of living a long-cherished dream. But commencing combat training late in the sultry summer was just the beginning of yet another dream. This phase of my flying training was one of the most interesting ones and in more than one way truly a learning experience.

This dream had been nourished by stories told in books and brought to life in movies about the world of the blue yonder. The overdose of excitement had clouded and yet challenged the mind. Throwing the aeroplane around in vibrantly coloured skies and pitching yourself against another human being in an alien environment is the ultimate test of skills, knowledge & may be in the real world of guts as well.
To be able to understand the exact frame of mind that I was in as the "trainee" learning the ropes of air combat, I have to introduce the manner in which the fighter pilot is trained. I will try and keep it simple.
A pilot would begin his flying training on a basic aeroplane for the majority on a prop, which would be slow and forgiving. He would first learn to take off and land his aeroplane safely and then gradually learn to throw it about before graduating onto a jet engine aeroplane. He would then learn to do the same on the jet, before being introduced to different concepts on how to use the aeroplane as a weapon.
This whole process would take about a year after which the triumphant would finally get to be a part of those who flew where no eagle or lark had ever flown.... to fly the Mig-21.
In learning to use the aeroplane as a weapon platform, the training was divided into phases. This particular phase of training was called the "one versus one". The first part of the training commenced with the briefing on the phase, a long session that defied all the rules of optimized learning since it extended for nearly four hours. It was a test of concentration, with all the training in the form of classroom lectures using boards, charts and aircraft models.
The second part included another detailed brief by the individual Instructor who would be the mentor through the phase. My Instructor was the Commanding Officer of the Squadron who had a million other matters on his mind to keep the Squadron war worthy, apart from having to attend to one trainee among the many and teach him the very basics of air-to-air combat.
To be honest I was worried about the kind of attention that I was going to get, from this extremely busy man.
What I learnt in the next few days was more than a just lesson in air combat. They were lessons that I would use in every sphere of my life.
Being a training mission, we would go up as a two-aircraft formation, and the leader of the formation would simulate being the enemy.
To commence the combat manoeuvring, we would use the phrase "combat-combat go". With that, we would turn into each other and then I as the attacker would attempt to stay behind the simulated enemy. I would then be taught a series of manoeuvres that I would use to stay behind him. I was expecting the manoeuvring to last as in my books and movies; for some length of time. I was expecting it to be fun.
At 3000 meters above mother earth, I positioned as the attacker, in a position of advantage over the leader of the formation.
But what I did after that was just a turn and pitched the nose of the aeroplane into the sky and after that the simulated combat was called off with the phrase "Stop-stop combat Stop".
This was a total disaster. The first experience was nothing close to what I had expected.
We did about five more of these "total disappointments" of what they called combat manoeuvres and headed back home.
The walk back from the tarmac lacked the "josh" that was perhaps evident in the rookie that had walked to the aeroplane, just an hour back. My instructor just said "Debrief in my office at four in the evening", nearly two hours from now. He also added, "come prepared". That I already was, or so I thought. We had just done a couple of turns and came back and we called it air combat.
That was just the start of a true learning experience.
The debrief lasted for four "short" hours for that twenty-minute sortie. Analysis of the air combat situation on the ground, drawing references from the radio calls, drawing to scale graphical representations of the combat situations, learning to draw inferences from the Flight data recorders of both the aeroplanes, and all the rest of it had been reduced to nothing compared to the most important lesson in my life. As I prepared to wind up he said to remember " Fighter Pilot is an attitude in life"
When I went back home that night I tried to define what the "fighter pilot attitude" was. I drew help from the poem "IF" by Rudyard Kipling.
It was about keeping my head, about trusting myself, that I had indeed in my preparation for flying, filled the minute with sixty minutes worth of distance run, and despite having done that I would need to force my heart, nerve and sinew, to serve my turn long after they are gone.
It was about air-to-air combat, but it turned out to be a lesson in life.
Lesson one:
Nothing pays like plain simple dedication when it comes to learning.
I was at the beginning of a great learning curve.
Lesson two:
There is no replacement for a dedicated & experienced teacher.
I was guided to it by a man who had been matured by thousands of hours of flying. I had been trained by a time-tested method of chalk & talk, with no Computer-based Training, no Learning Management Systems or Modern teaching management principles. Just plain & simple care for me as a student.
Lesson three:
There is always a banana skin waiting around the corner.
What you expect may not happen always. I had expectations, they were dashed in a turn and a pitch of the nose, but then the thrill was in getting the understanding right.
The fact that I worked nearly twice as hard after that and was able to get to where I wanted, was more than a testimony to the fact that banana skins may not always be bad after all.
There are many “banana skin" experiences in life. This was one of the banana skins that sent me a couple of flights of stairs down.
But from where I stand today many flights down, I think it is time to draw upon this lesson & realise that I am the teacher, and I am the student too.

In Pursoot....

Tonight the black yonder is beneath me

Flying is just as natural to man as it can be to an elephant, and yet we are rash enough to do it and do it by night. What's more we are senseless enough to do it alone and in the darkest of nights when even the owl would think twice about a hunt!

These are trips to realms that only a select few are treated to, and even among that select few, the experience that each of them has is unique and only one of a kind, because at that moment in time and space there is only that poor soul experiencing it. Not many of them end on a high note, but for me, fortunately this is one of the experiences that I can write about.

I was stationed out in the back of the beyond where only men & women who can perceive and see the enemy, are stationed and only to keep the mongrels away. Well.... Talking of mongrels across the man-made line there were men & perhaps women, who thought about us in the same way, I am sure! But that is for another day.

It was a dark night, as dark as it gets. They just do not make them as dark any more, especially in the places that I stay in now.

The dark phase of the moon is defined somewhere in the orders, instructions, procedures or briefings, all lifesaving texts that define almost everything that can be defined about flying. But for the faint hearted, I will just say the dark phase of night flying, is when the phase of the moon was such that it would rise so late and be so small that its presence would light up only the lover's hearts, but leave the night dark enough.

While flying by night over cities and populated areas, one can distinguish the land from the sky by the city lights, but flying over the desert or the sea by night, just inverts everything, the lights are up in the sky and the ground is reduced to an ocean of darkness. The zillion stars and the darkness below can make one wonder, if we could actually be alone in this universe?

So we have the three phases as far as I am concerned, the moon phase, the dark phase, and the crazy phase. Normally the evening briefing before night flying would let us know by when the moon phase or the dark phase would turn into the crazy phase, but what the hell any one can make mistakes. This was one such night.

Crazy nights are the ones when visibility is reduced by, smoke, haze, or anything else that basically makes visibility drop. On this occasion it was mist turning to fog, both of which are water vapour, except that fog is denser and reduces the visibility more.

For the common man, a strip of the runway is one runway, but for a pilot it's two for the simple reason that you can land in two directions! On this particular night we were all recovering in the north-easterly direction which meant that we went out into the sea before turning finals towards the runway. As a process most of us would practice the precision approach radar (PAR) recovery, and of course it's a nice feeling to know that you have someone to talk to.

A PAR recovery is much like a continuously talked down recovery to base. The radar controller has a plan, and the pilot executes the plan. It’s like a director-actor relationship. The minor aberration in the comparison is that only actors get criticised. After all it's his life that is on track and on glide slope.

Any way the plan is that the aircraft is taken away to a certain distance from the beginning of the runway and then is turned in to align with the runway, configured for landing, before being gradually descended to the beginning of the runway. When the pilot is able to gather enough visual references to land, he goes ahead and brings his first love, the aircraft to her mother in law, to Terra Firma. If not, he opens throttle and starts all over again. 

Any way on one of these nights my profile did not include PAR recovery, but I was to be a good son and bring back the daughter in law to my mother and without coercion from the radar controllers.

But there were others who were also bringing back the daughters in law, all to the same mother in law, but they chose to seek help. So somewhere in between all aircraft being vectored to base, I was slotted in for a visual approach. The task of maintaining separation between aircraft becomes the controllers, and this is normally done well in time, but somehow it so happened that that I was asked to extend the leg before being asked to turn in towards the runway. I was facing the sea and normally we would be turning in a few seconds after crossing the coast. 

But after having been asked to wait before turning in, I was now travelling out over the sea. Any pilot will tell you, it is not a comfortable feeling riding a thin delta for an excuse of a wing, at low power settings, with gears down and locked & at low levels over the sea. About ten to fifteen seconds out from where we normally would have turned, I think I glanced back over my shoulder to see if I could see any trace of civilization in the form of lights of the base. 

That's when the black yonder began to slide. In a slow and smooth and ever so slow motion, I felt the whole dimly lit stage filled with brightly lit stars start its gentle slide first to one side and then slowly  seemed to slip under the nose of the MiG.

I could not have thanked myself any more that day for not having slept thru my aviation medicine classes, and even more strong was my feeling of gratitude that I felt for our instructors who mentioned all these illusions ever so often.

The human mind is so beautifully adaptable that sometimes I wonder if  natural selection did in fact make an error, but then earth bound misfits are perhaps exceptions to the theory of selection. How can you otherwise explain the thoughtlessness to go and fly, and that too in the darkest of dark nights?

This fight between adaptability and stable development is perhaps best realised when man pushes himself to the edges of his physical limits. The sense of balance is primarily taken care off in the inner ear which has canals that are filled with fluid and have hair that are connected to nerves that tell the “mass between the ears” that the balance has been disturbed.

As the fluid in the ear moves the hair detects this motion and tells the body so. Combined with the eye & voila we have the perfect sense of balance. But there are two minor problems.

First that on a really dark night the eyes may  just  as well be two glass marbles, & second that the once there is no change in the rate of motion, all the years of development of the superior human body goes straight out of the window.

The ear reacts only to rate of change, not a sustained change. So if the motion is constant, that is if the turn or aircraft roll is constant the ear will compensate quickly, and tell the brain that it has returned to level flight. Therefore if the pilot fails to refer to his instruments and notice that in fact his aeroplane is slowly but steadily in a state of changing motion, before he realises it he & and his aeroplane will land up in a what is called an unusual attitude.

So big deal, just refer to the instruments and fly. Easier said than done, especially when the brain gets conflicting reports. The ear is telling it that all is well, and the eye telling it that it's all just the opposite.

The human eye detects motion with reference to the objects behind it.  Many of who can recollect our train journeys will remember the confusion at stations as the train on the opposite track would start to move. Was it theirs or ours, one can never really tell at first. Similarly by a dark night a solitary light or a cluster of lights could easily appear to move, because of the lack of reference. And for the pilot when this motion may be in the three dimensions, the whole concept of motion takes on a new form.

So here I was heading out into the sea with the unending darkness ahead of me, with nothing but a solitary ship with its few lights, many miles ahead. I did not expect to reach the ship, and therefore had preconceived that the ships lights would therefore move in a particular manner.

To be honest I expected it to stay pretty much stationary on my front wind shield. But that was just not the way that the lights were moving. They were moving closer and seemed to be slipping away beneath my nose and sliding to the right. Little did I realise that I had in fact started to turn left & away from the runway, turning away from the direction that I was supposed.

A combination of the my noticing the compass card reading reducing instead of increasing, aviation medicine lessons & the crystal clear radio transmission from my familiar friend in the ATC, "Sabre 1 report turning base", jolted me out of the trance, and with every ounce of strength in my body, I banked to the right, forcing myself to keep the altimeter from descending and to keep the speed from dropping any more. I seemed to be fighting a demon, which had taken control of my mind and wanted me to take my love and me into a watery grave. The battle lasted for what seemed like eternity, but in reality was just about thirty or forty seconds on the outside. But the demon existed for as long as I could not see lights. As I turned back towards land, the first glimpse of the faint light of the fishing village was all it took to force the devil to retreat.

Back in control, I quickly completed the checks to ensure the aircraft was in landing configuration. Speed less than 550, Air-brakes in, Undercarriage down, flaps 45, brakes ok. Three greens. On finals full flaps, and went on to an in eventful landing. Taxied back on the meandering taxi ways into the flight line.

As I unbuckled my straps, I tried to recapture where exactly did I start to fight the demon and wait a minute where exactly was I possessed?

As I was walking back, there was Zulfi, a vetran squadron leader, an honest man singing to himself.... "aaj mein upar aasman niche", a song from the Hindi Movie Khamoshi. It translates to read as "today I am on top and the sky is beneath me". Indeed .....

His smile as we walked back, said it all. It was not a crazy night, it was a night to stay on ground.

And that is what we did, cancelled the second half of the flying program & called it a night, for tonight the black yonder was beneath us.

Madhav