The Nylon Descent

The word Quetta is from word Kwatta meaning fort in Baluchi. The Quetta valley is indeed like a fort surrounded by tall barren mountains called Chiltan, Takatu, Mordar and Zarghum. A long time back, Mahmud of Ghazni came to this valley. Later, it was in the hands of Humayun and Akbar until the Khans of Kalat took over. Finally, the British conquered it 1876 making it their garrison city and setting up the famous military staff college. The British also linked it up with railway with the rest of India and also extended into Iran. The old Quetta city was razed to the ground in 1935 earthquake killing 40,000 people. The new city came up on the Southern mountain slopes of the valley. On the Western slopes was a village known as Samungli where the Italian prisoners of War were kept in the WW 11. This became the Samungli Air Force Base where I was posted flying the Migs. From the Air Force Base on the slopes, one could see the long 13000 feet runway in the valley built by the Americans during the cold war to spy over the Soviet Union.

Having been recently established, the air base was a make shift arrangement with little infrastructure. We lived in the barracks made for the Italian prisoners. There was plenty of wildlife around in the form of scorpions and snakes. Water trickled through the taps as the proper systems had not yet been established. There was also a perennial low voltage turning the bulbs into candles. Sui gas had yet not been sanctioned to Balochistan. But to keep us warm in the bitter cold of Quetta, we used a funny contraption called the Quetta stove, in which oil trickled down drop by drop, burning slowly and heating up this metallic contraption that warmed the surroundings. It was a highly effective device. Another climatic deficiency was the dryness of local weather. Cream and chap stick had to be regularly used to keep the skin oily and the lips from cracking. The best the city could offer us was local delicacy of ’sajji’ where the skewers were made to pass through the chicken, rather disrespectfully, and stuck into the ground in a circle with fire burning in the middle. The fire cooked the chickens in slow heat making it tender with juices still intact inside. The city had the freshest fruits like the Qandhari anar, garmas and grapes; and best quality Iranian dry fruit. I am talking about the period around 1978 when Quetta was no more than a sleepy cantonment border town and the excitement in form of Taliban, AL Qaeeda and Jihadis was yet to arrive.

Our day began with the usual routine of shaving with ice cold water and donning the many-layered warm clothing. The weather brief invariably included a ‘Western Disturbance’. It was followed by the air traffic brief and the emergencies session in which the pilots discussed aircraft emergencies. With this over, tall mugs of tea followed.

It was a terribly cold day with a clear sky. I was flying a routine training mission with Adnan, a young pilot recently posted in the squadron. We carried out our mission briefing and proceeded to the aircraft. A slight wind had further increased the chill factor. But the Chinese Migs were happy with this kind of weather. The engines produced more thrust and the brakes did not get hot.

We taxied out and lined up on the runway. Adnan lined up behind me on the right side. He was to take off after a 10 seconds gap as Number Two. We carried out the take off checks. I released the brakes for the take off roll. The aircraft accelerated rapidly. At 280 kph, I raised the nose wheel; and the aircraft left the ground at 300 kph.

And then, all of sudden, it happened. There was a loud bang, and thick smoke rushed into the cockpit from the right duct. In a flash, the cockpit was filled with thick smoke reducing my visibility to zero. I could not see the flight instruments.

I must have been barely at 200 feet from the ground and I had yet not raised my Flaps. I had no way of finding out where the aircraft was heading and in what attitude. Instinctively, the mind switched over to the emergency mode. I had little time and whatever had to be done, had to be done fast. The required actions had been programmed into my psyche over the years. The mental recall was ’’Fire in flight: Eject. Close to the ground, flight instruments not visible: Do not delay ejection’’.

I raised my hands over to grope for the ejection handle; felt it; grasped it and gave it a sharp pull. The moment I pulled the ejection handle, hell broke loose. The rocket under my seat fired. My seat was catapulted out of the aircraft at a high speed shearing through the glass canopy overhead shattering it into bits. The rocket propelled the seat vertically 200 feet high.

As the seat tore up into the sky, the events were no more in my control. It went into the programmed tumbles for the seat-separation mechanism to work. I was thrown around like a yo-yo. In those fleeting unpredictable moments, I quickly did a re-cap of my life; and a stray thought came to my mind ’’Am I being paid enough for this job?’’ By then the smaller Chute blossomed which pulled me out of the seat. I could barely keep up with the rapidly changing events and my orientation.

And then, there was a strong pull on my body as if I was being lifted up and the whole world came to a standstill. The nylon parachute canopy had fully blossomed on top. It was now all quiet barring the slight swish of cold air around me. I began the nylon descent. The parachute was bringing me down and I was already close to the ground.

I looked around. The Samungli airfield was in front and barren rocky broken ground right underneath me where I was to drop. I had ejected from a very low height; and the ejection system had the barest of time to go through its full operation. I was now very close to the ground and had to be ready to break the fall to prevent an injury. I readied myself; looked up, and then suddenly hit the ground. I knew it was not the best of landings.

The impact was hard and I could sense something crumbling in my body. There was not much time to take up a proper landing posture, but what had further contributed to the hard impact were my newly-issued hard MO boots, the local fashion, instead of the authorized flexible flying boots. Something had certainly broken inside me but I was fully conscious. Broken things do get repaired, I thought as I looked around. To add to the eeriness of an already eerie situation, I had dropped in the middle of a graveyard.

As I lay on the ground, I disconnected the parachute, but could not get up. There was an unbearable pain in my left hip joint. The pain was so intense that I ceased to feel it. I was all alone in that wilderness. There was nothing that I could do except to wait for help.

The helicopter came. I was moved to the CMH Quetta and taken straight to the operation theatre. With a pain killer injection, the pain gave way to a sweet sensation of floating in the air. The doctors relocated my left hip joint which had come out of the socket; and nailed down my right tibia which had broken into two pieces and had come out of the leg. In a little over one year, I was fit again and flying.

And now the superstition part. Only two days before the incident, my wife had dreamt that my two servants were carrying me out of a graveyard. Being the superstitious type, she had spoken of this dream to her neighbor and gotten two black goats sacrificed as ’sadqa’. Her dream indeed came true.

What came handy was the British Martin Baker Ejection seat with zero-zero capability (0 altitude – 0 speed) which our Migs were modified with. The original Chinese seat had a minimum safe ejection altitude of 1500 feet and 350 Kph; and I was definitely out of that seat’s functioning parameters.

I shall never know what role, if any, was played by those two black goats. But I am now certainly favourably confused about the powers of the unknown…..