What I miss about flying

I flew my last flight (I almost said sortie) on 31 Dec 2020. Three days later I turned 65 and my Airline Transport Licence (ATPL) expired. From now on I can do hobby flying, but no commercial flying for remuneration. So what began on 27 Jan 1977 in Bidar at the Air Force Elementary Flying School (EFS) when I flew my first sortie (yes, that’s right, sortie not flight) ended at about noon that day in Bangalore at the Kempegowda International Airport when I landed back after a short flight to Mangalore.

On board were my wife and daughter, who had never in my short civil flying career of about thirteen years, flown in an aircraft I had piloted. Nor had they in my previous avatar in the Indian Air Force for about 29 years ever seen me fly a fighter. And I had flown many — MiG-21s, MiG-23s, MiG-27s and yes, also the Sea Harrier, which I flew with the Indian Navy when I was seconded there to teach naval pilots air combat. I must mention a few hours on the Sukhoi-30 which I wrote a paper on. No one of consequence possibly read that. We are not great readers. Talking takes up all our time. That was possibly the best piece of work I did in the IAF and it probably was rolled up into a ball and tossed into the trash can. So much for human vanity. So a fair number of aircraft and my family had never seen me fly any.

So what’s the difference between a flight and a sortie? A sortie is a flight you make in a military aircraft individually or as part of a mission. A flight is just that = a flight.

Anyway now that part of my life is over. I flew the other day as a passenger with no connection to the airline or the cockpit crew. I got into the queue, exposed my belongings to the X-Ray scanner, was patted down, turned around, was patted down again and picked up my belongings. My aircrew bag still had a tag saying ‘Flight Crew’ which I had neglected to remove. Came the time when we boarded the bus on the tarmac to the aircraft. All those aircraft lined up, the familiar sounds and smells, but no one I knew. Walked into the aircraft, made the usual grimace back to the cabin crew as they greeted me, found my seat, stowed my luggage, got up again for a middle row passenger and sat down again. The flight took off. The weather was slightly bumpy. It had rained heavily in both Bangalore and Kochi. Bad weather flying was something I had always enjoyed, the worse the weather the better. I had always found civil flying boring after those years flying fighters in the Air Force. Bad weather gave me a challenge I missed. Of course some of my copilots did not quite enjoy it the way I did.

So what do I miss?

I realised I do not miss the flying. The time for that is over. I might do some hobby flying, if I can hire an aircraft cheap enough, say on a trip to the US perhaps, where flying is cheaper than anywhere else. After all they invented the aeroplane.

So what do I miss?

Not civil flying. Not even fighter flying. But that’s because the faculties that you need to be a fighter pilot are not what they once were. I remember the fighter controller at the radar telling me “Champagne One, bogie 32 km 11 o’clock” and me saying “Contact” meaning that I had made eye contact. At 30 odd kms, the MiG-21 subtends an angle at the eye of about 0.34 milliradians. A milliradian is one-thousandth of a radian. A radian equals 57.3 degrees. So that MiG-21 subtended about 0.019 degrees at my eye. That’s a speck. And I had caught the flash of sunlight glinting off the wings as he banked. “Gotcha”, I thought. Whoever picks up the other first has the advantage and can manoeuvre to position advantageously.

But I now use glasses to read and my far vision is starting to deteriorate. I still drive fast. My air force nickname used to be ‘Speedy’ because I spoke and drove fast and signed many warnings in the process. But those days are long gone. Thanks to a rigorous exercise regime, I am noticeably fitter than most of my colleagues, but still not fit enough in my estimation, to fly a fighter the way it should be flown in close combat. You need good reactions, good eyesight, quick thinking and situational awareness, all of which I am sure are well below what they were in my twenties and thirties. But of course, the air force has also changed in the time I’ve been gone. There’s new equipment, new technologies, new weapons. Long range missiles which can knock an aircraft one hundred and fifty kms away out of the sky, airborne warning and control aircraft to tell you that an aircraft has taken off at an airfield deep inside enemy territory and is possibly headed your way and flight refuelling aircraft to tank up some fuel when running low. We would probably have had to eject or force land in the same circumstances. Good for the youngsters of today. It would have been nice to fly the new aircraft and fire the new weapons, but we too had our fun. These youngsters will probably never see anything like that. It was good while it lasted.

So what do I miss?

What I liked was the ORP duties that we pulled as air defence squadrons. We had to man the Operational Readiness Platforms (ORPs) at forward air bases in order to intercept a likely enemy air intrusion. The duty started before dawn. You woke up very early and drove to the runway at the ends of which the blast pens housing the fighters were situated. By half an hour to sunrise you had to have the aircraft ready. So you got in, started up the aircraft, checked out the radar and missiles systems and switched off the aircraft leaving all the switches on. Then you reported to the air defence cell in command that you were ready, while having the first of innumerable cups of tea through the day. All you had to do when the scramble call came was to run to the aircraft from your rest room, jump in, press the starter button while strapping yourself into your ejection seat, taxy to the runway adjacent and takeoff, all within two minutes from the time you received the scramble call. Because that was ‘Two Minute Readiness’, implying that there was a live threat being tracked. So you had to be in the restroom, fully dressed in G-suit and ready to bolt. Sometimes you got a five minute alert in which case you could be more relaxed in just your overalls without the G-suit.

After your early morning exertions, you got out of the underground rest room and climbed up atop the stone blast walls protecting the aircraft and watched the sun coming up. A beautiful sight.

Perhaps it’s winter. Nothing more beautiful than the crystal clear vision of a desert morning. The chill in the air, but a healthy chill. A hot cup of tea in your hand warming you up, the edges of distant dunes starkly visible to the naked eye as if they are a hundred yards away instead of ten kilometres. The air is so clear you can almost touch them.

The morning shift got off duty around noon or so when the next shift relieved you. They had to carry out duties till half an hour after sunset. You keep looking at your watch wondering what is keeping the buggers? The same thing had happened yesterday. In case you got the second shift, then after your duty was over, you went out and got the aircraft safe, putting all the aircraft switches off, in case it was only day ORP. Meanwhile you had spent the last few minutes watching the sun going down and having the last of the mandatory cups of tea prepared by Lokaram, your resident tea expert in the kitchen.

Maybe it was summer in Rajasthan in Jaisalmer or Utterlai. The fierce sun has gone down. The blinding light has given way to the mellow light of twilight. You sit there watching the colours slowly change and the shadows creep up. The air cools down slowly. The nocturnal creatures of the desert wake up and start to forage. A solitary owl hoots. A jackal crosses the runway. A flight of geese make their way across the darkening sky, their calls echoing in the stillness. Where are they headed? To Keoladeo Ghana near Bharatpur or the other way, to Siberia?

Perhaps you have drawn the night shift and have to stay till sunrise. After dinner, you again come out on top. Perhaps it’s a moonlit night, the moon hanging in solitary splendour, the old man and his rabbit clearly visible. A youngster points out Ursa Major or Orion. When flying in a dark night above the desert in Rajasthan, you see points of light above and speckles of light below. The sky and the ground, barely distinguishable from each other. If you inverted the aircraft you would not notice the difference. So beguiled by this similarity, we had some people flying into the ground at night. “IAF pilot dies during a training flight at night in the Western sector……………” The cause is disorientation. Humans were not designed to fly. But we do. And occasionally pay a price for the privilege.

We are the lucky ones. Still around to tell stories about the stupid stuff we did and survived. Others didn’t. But that’s flying. And I wouldn’t have changed anything.