Jimmy Thomas, Author at 55NDA Blog

Unit Birthday and Anniversary Celebrations

I was putting up a post on a friend’s Facebook wall to wish him a happy birthday when I realized how impersonal and automated the whole process has become. Facebook reminds me that it is so and so’s birthday and would I like to wish him? It then directs me to the appropriate person’s wall and prompts me to type a message. My mobile keyboard remembers the appropriate word sequence once I type ‘Happy’, and all I have to do is accept the complete sentence followed by my friend’s name to make it look personal.

The whole system reminded me of a CO who insisted that every bachelor on his birthday and every married officer on his anniversary must get a Unit sponsored gift. Most of the time people already have everything they needed and a gift is therefore something useless.

The Adjutant and the rest of the Unit Officers came out with a solution to keep the CO happy. On every occasion they pooled the money (usually deducted from the ‘Tea Club’ account) and gave the concerned Officer a lump sum of money to do what he felt like (something like a kitty) and at the evening party a neatly wrapped box with some trash was handed over to the Officer.

The CO was happy because he was under the impression that the Officer was getting something he liked or desired to have and everybody else was happy since no nerve racking brainstorming or shopping was involved. The Officer was happy because he had some extra spending money… of course I wondered what would happen to the Adjutant if the CO ever found out!!

Sunset Peak trek

>‘Taking someone for a ride’ is a fairly common expression, but taking someone for a trek? My poor unfortunate copilots have recently been getting a lot of it! We have this flight to Hong Kong which starts from Mumbai in the evening and makes it to Hong Kong early morning, the next day. As crew, … Continue reading “Sunset Peak trek”

>‘Taking someone for a ride’ is a fairly common expression, but taking someone for a trek? My poor unfortunate copilots have recently been getting a lot of it! We have this flight to Hong Kong which starts from Mumbai in the evening and makes it to Hong Kong early morning, the next day. As crew, we have about 24 hours of free time at Hong Kong before the next flight back. Having seen all the sights when we were flying the Airbus 310 ten years earlier, there is little else to do but sleep and watch TV or probably go down to the Citygate mall near our airport hotel.

Hong Kong airport used to be one of those tricky places to land into and there are numerous tales of pilots making hairy approach into Kai Tak. It was classified as the 6th most dangerous airport in the world. The runway extended into the sea with hills all around the other sides. The landing approach at Kai Tak was spectacular and world-famous – the aircraft would pass over the harbour, and then over the densely populated areas of Kowloon. Upon reaching a small hill marked with a huge orange and white checkerboard, used as a visual reference point, the pilot needed to make a 50° visual right turn to line up with the runway and complete the final leg at a fairly low height of 140 feet, to line up with the runway. This manoeuvre has become widely known in the piloting community as the “Hong Kong Turn” or “Checkerboard Turn”. Amongst passengers it became known as the “Kai Tak Heart Attack”

In part due to all this and a need to increase capacity, the British before handing over the crown colony back to the Chinese at the end of it’s 99 year lease decided to build a new airport. Since most of Hong Kong and the New Territories are either islands or hills or both, finding a flat piece of land large enough to accommodate a couple of runways and the associated infrastructure was going to be tricky. The Brits did the next best thing – combined the islands of Chek Lap Kok and Lam Chau off the largest island of Lantau, south of Hong Kong island.

This is the island which you see from the airport hotel, easily spotted by two prominent hill features about 2700 feet high. A close look at the map of Lantau on Google maps shows a number of hiking trails running around the island. An Internet site dedicated to trekking on Lantau gives a description of the difficulty level, access points and approximate duration of each manageable segment on the 70 odd km long circular trail. A useful app which can be downloaded free for most places is one called maps.me. The salient feature of this app is that it works on downloaded maps and can thus be used offline. The maps here show trekking trails and bus stops, which I find extremely useful.

I had already completed two sections of the trail, one going beside Lantau peak and the other right over it, on earlier trips into Hong Kong. The one I was planning today was over the lesser Sunset peak. The trek segment was classified as ‘Very difficult’ and predicted to take almost three hours over a distance of about 7 km. I had already prepared my copilot in advance before leaving Mumbai to come prepared for the trek – mainly water bottles, a sturdy pair of shoes, a light jacket and a small backpack to carry a lunch pack. Other useful items would be a flashlight in case it got late, a camera and of course a fully charged smart phone preferably with an additional battery pack.

A short nap after the red eye flight into Hong Kong and my copilot and I were good to go at 1 pm. The hotel shuttle dropped us at the Citygate mall and from there it’s a short walk to the bus station where we pick up the number 3M bus to Mui Wo on the eastern side of the island. The planned trek segment starts at a place called Nam Shan where we alight.

My copilot is fairly enthusiastic and the initial section of the trek goes well. About a kilometre into the trek and we have been climbing steeply with more frequent breaks, ostensibly to take pictures but in reality to catch our breath!

The good part of treks in Hong Kong is that the path is well made, with clear markings.

The climb is on rough cut stone slabs which provides ample support and a fair degree of confidence to the novice trekker. The signage helps too – they pop up every 500 m and give you some kind of encouragement to go on as the distance counter is seen to wind down.

Surprisingly there are very few other hikers. The only group,we came across was a bunch of youngsters on a photo shoot – at least it looked like one, seeing the pro version of lenses they were using on their tripod mounted SLR. We took the opportunity to shoot some pics ourselves as well. The clouds were at times below us and the fair wind was pushing them along at a good pace. The strong winds were also being made use of by the odd bird on the look out for prey. The wind kept the bird at the same spot without even having to flap its wings! Lazy bird, we thought.

The marked trail actually bypassed Sunset Peak, but having climbed this far, we thought the additional climb to the peak was worth the effort, if nothing else but to take a pic on the trig point marking the elevation of the hill. The rough track going up Sunset peak was not too steep but unlike the earlier neatly laid out trail, it was a rough slippery affair. We scrambled up easily enough but coming down we had to clutch at straws along the path literally!

Going downhill is the real tricky part – it is stressful on the feet and your joints start to jar with the constant impact with hard rock. There is also the requirement of holding back on your downward momentum which is a strain on your calf muscles as well. The speeds are still good and we can spot the Tian Tan Buddha atop Ngong Ping in the distance. A helicopter buzzes by in the twilight, probably practising dusk landings on a helipad on Lantau hill across us.

We are down fairly quick and at the end of the trail near the bus stop, waiting for a bus. The return options are more with a choice of either the 3M, 11 or 23 bus. The first one is packed but we get the next one back to Tung Chung and on to the hotel. I thought it might be the last I see of my copilot with regard to trekking but a few days later I am heartened to get an SMS declaring that his aches and pains are gone and where are we going next?

Aerial Photography

We were visiting my friend and course mate Girish Saini the other day at his house at Pune. His daughter Gauri was showing me her camera, a Nikon DSLR and asked if I could do something about the lack of clarity in the results before she took it to a camera shop. She had been on a holiday to Mauritius with her friends and had been clicking away group pictures. Now it turns out that they are all rather blurred and she didn’t know what to tell her friends. I assured her that whatever it was, it couldn’t be as bad as the predicament I was in when I was in the Air Force.

It was way back in the nineties when we were carrying out armed missions over the Siachin, long before the Kargil incident happened. There was a Siachin fighter mission planned that day and the CO, a photography buff himself, decided to take a trainer variant of our aircraft so we could take some good photographs over the Siachin with the fighters in the foreground.

As chief photographer of the squadron – because I had an SLR (not a DSLR, it was in the days of film!) – I was the natural choice. The big day dawned, nice and clear, an ideal day for air to air photography. I pulled out my trusty Canon ME Super. It had a reel loaded from earlier and the counter read a low usage of 8, leaving almost 28 shots to go. Colour films were expensive those days and in fact we tried to squeeze out 39 out of the 36 possible shots by dark room loading and going to the very end of the reel.

I clambered into the front seat with my SLR and the telephoto lens plus a wide angle lens for good measure, in case we came close enough to the fighters. My CO hauled himself into the rear seat, a rather cramped affair with minimal outside view. The fighters soon got airborne and went about their business, with us trailing along till we reached the glacier. Over the glacier we closed in and I happily clicked away while the fighters went though their manoeuvres. I must have taken about 20 odd snaps when we decided to call it a day and return to base before the fuel levels ran too low. .

When we landed, we were all keen to see the results printed as quickly as possible – personal copies for everyone plus some for the museum, album too. I had to hold everybody back – it was my camera and film after all – it had 8 snaps left and since I was going on leave in a few days, I said I would use up the remaining film at home and show the results when I got back. The CO grudgingly agreed and off I went on leave.

My daughter Anisha was still young then – incidentally she and Gauri are of the same age – and as a doting young father I took her to the park to play on the swings. I pulled out my camera again and was clicking the first shot when I realized that there was a certain lack of tension in the reel – it was as if the film had broken. I stopped using the camera and took it to the studio to ask the technician to open the camera in the dark room and salvage whatever was possible from the film and print it. He asked me to come back the next day.

Long trip into town the next day. I was all agog, waiting to see and show off the results thereafter. No Facebook and WhatsApp those days – you had to stick the photos in an album and then under people’s noses to get them to ‘like’ it!! – I was at the studio at the appointed hour – the technician was there alright and instead of the results, a shock! He gave me back my camera and said that there was no film inside! How could that be, I wondered? Then it dawned on me – I had been trying out the camera settings months back by checking the ME Super’s auto function and self generated shutter speed in different light conditions. In the process I had kept winding an empty camera but the numbers had kept advancing to 8. When I took it out next I presumed it had a reel in it since I had forgotten my earlier trial runs. Over the Siachin, the excitement about the aerial photography prevented me from noticing the slack which was so evident at ground level.

So Gauri, who do you think had the bigger job explaining away the lack of photographs?

Memories of Rohit Soni

Rohit C Soni, reminded me of the actor George C Scott who played Patton in that eponymously named movie. Partly this was because of the way the name rolled off your tongue and partly by the way he carried himself. I have always thought of ‘Sonyman’ as he was fondly called, as old before his time. Rohit and I were course mates at the National Defence Academy (NDA) and that’s where we first met. We were both Air Force Cadets or ‘Fly boys’ in the 55th Course which commenced training in Jan 1976. Rohit was a little older than the majority of us in the course – while most of us hadn’t started shaving, lacking the appropriate quantity and quality of facial hair, there was ‘Sonyman’ with a hardened stubble! He was the envy of all us who were doing our best to just grow a decent moustache, even past the mandatory drill square test passing Third term. Rohit also had a matching gravelly voice to go with his looks. His classmate was the then Academy Cadet Adjutant, Bharat Singh, who was two and a half years ahead of us at NDA. It was only natural that a number of cadets mistook Rohit for a senior and paid due obeisance, of course with the inevitable backlash when it was revealed that he was in fact, a junior. It was even reported that he had once been mistaken for a Divisional Officer!

Rohit, after passing out of NDA, went on along with us ‘fly boys’ to the flying training academies and was commissioned into the helicopter stream. My next encounter with Rohit was at Tezpur, where we were sent for training on the MiGs. He was by then posted to an operational Helicopter Unit, commanded by Wg Cdr ‘Fighter Pilot’ Malhotra. We spent about a year together, but after the stint at Tezpur the fighter pilots split up to join various operational squadrons, most of us on the Western front.

In Jan 1987, we bumped into each other once again at Tambaram, since we were both selected for the same Flying Instructor’s Course. We were newly married by then and Rohit and I were allotted the same barrack style accommodation, he at the end of the block and I next door. There were seven of us, all the junior most of the married officers, including Chandra Kant Vyas, a Direct Entry course mate of ours, also from helicopters.

Rohit and his wife Sangeeta with their new born son Karan were all squeezed into the same standard ‘hand me down’ two room bachelor accommodation as the rest of us Course officers. ‘Hand me down’, since even the single officers had a newer, larger set of rooms than we married officers. If we thought we had problems as newly marrieds and with no children yet, Rohit and Sangeeta must have been truly jammed -in true Indian tradition, Rohit’s mother Mrs Mahasweta Soni was also staying with him to help out with new-born Karan. ‘Aunty’, of course was a great comfort to all of us, especially the young wives in the block – an older person ever at hand and ready to lend a sympathetic ear and serve a comforting cup of tea. This was definitely the case when all of us were recalled to our parent units for Op Brasstacks.

Leaving Tambaram, we were not sure of the outcome of the Operations –there were tearful farewells all round with ‘Aunty’ extolling the tearful wives to put up a brave face as the husbands were leaving to defend the nation. Since we were under training however, we were the last to be recalled and the first to return to peace locations. As luck would have it, only two of us in the block were from the Fighter stream- the rest were all from either the Helicopter or the Transport stream.

I mention this to highlight the fact that most of the training at Tambaram was of the aerobatic type with ‘patter’ – the verbal description of a manoeuvre an instructor is supposed to demonstrate, synchronised with the manoeuvre itself. Us fighter jocks were familiar with the manoeuvres as that was our bread and butter – we just had to master the dreaded ‘patter’, which had to be learnt by rote. The others in the block had the unenviable task of learning both, the manoeuvres as well as the ‘patter’ which made the course pretty tough for them.

‘Sonyman’ had an ace up his sleeve however – the Commanding Officer at Tambaram was his very own ex CO, now Gp Capt ‘Fighter Pilot’ Malhotra. While the fighter jocks chilled out and the rest burnt the midnight oil practising ‘patter’ on our long suffering wives, ‘Sonyman’ was nowhere to be seen. It turned out later that he was getting his ‘patter’ instructions straight from the horse’s mouth, presumably over a drink at the CO’s house!

After the gruelling time at Tambaram, which wasn’t helped by the cramped living conditions and the sultry weather, all of us successful Instructor pilots were sent off to the Flying Training Establishments in and around Hyderabad-Secunderabad. Rohit and I had a fairly longish time together at AF Station Hakimpet which hosted both, the Helicopter Training School as well as the Fighter Training Wing. I remember distinctly one flying incident involving Rohit, while at Hakimpet. It was during a routine training flight, while carrying out a practice autorotation exercise, the tail rotor struck the ground while coming in for a landing. Rohit had a pretty close shave then and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when we heard he had escaped unhurt. Once we completed our tenure as instructors, we were pretty much out of touch and went our separate ways, lost in the maze that is the IAF.

Facebook and Whatsapp were yet to appear on the horizon, calls and mails were not as common place as they are now – STD calls were still made at telephone booths with an eye on the meter displaying the large amounts we were running up. Once in a while though, we bumped into each other at some Temporary Duty station, either on detachment or on some short course, but that was about all. I retired prematurely from the IAF and moved on to Mumbai in 2003, while Rohit plodded on in the Air Force, like the good soldier he was. I had heard that he was commanding the AF Museum at Palam and couldn’t resist a chuckle thinking that it was an appropriate place for ‘old man’ Soni – along with all the ancient war birds! I have no doubt he was ribbed by each and everyone of us who came to know of this posting.

Despite all our friendly leg pulling, Rohit was a true sport. He took all of it in his stride and often gave back as good as he got. It was with deep sadness I learnt of his recent losing battle with cancer. He was a brave and proud man who didn’t want to seem weak in the eyes of his friends. He wanted to keep his struggle a private affair – one only known to his family and his close friends. By the time his condition was made known to us, his course mates, the cancer that was eating away at his body was in its terminal phase.

Rohit breathed his last on the 12th of May, surrounded by his family. I along with my course mates grieve his passing and can only offer our deepest condolences to his bereaved family. He leaves behind his wife Sangeeta, his two children Karan and Tina, and his mother, Mrs Mahasweta Soni. Sangeeta is a strong lady and I am confident she will recover from this blow to the family with the assistance of her children.

We, as course mates, must do our best to be with her in these troubled times and help her get back to life as close to normal as possible. Keeping in touch is easy these days, and necessary – please do so. It may be the only thing required at this stage – to know that Rohit’s friends and course mates are available as a support system.