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