Recall : A choppy affair

We all dream. I do.  I ‘day dream’ too. I live literally in the backyard of HAL, Bangalore. I have more than once imagined an aircraft crashing into one of the buildings as I watched or a helicopter crash landing on one of the roof tops. I have often wondered that one day one of these test pilots with their eternally under development machines will land on my roof. I tell you very often dreams turn into reality. Sometimes there are near misses. On the day before yesterday one helicopter force landed on the roof of a building about a kilometer from my house.  They landed on the terrace of a building alright,  but alas, it was not mine.  Yet, it was close - a 'near miss' dream. The machine was a Schweizer-300C helicopter.

This incident reminded me of a time in Sikkim when I was airborne in a chopper.  Seldom there happens something which is not dreamt. It did then. It had been snowing along the IB in the Nathu La and the adjoining sectors in East Sikkim for a few days. On a particularly bad day a patrolling party was caught in a blizzard and lost their way.  Rescue teams were pressed into service but we found the patrol had scattered over on either side of the watershed. When the skies cleared in a couple of days after the blizzard we had yet to account for two more soldiers from that patrol. Others had been rescued alive. With clear skies, which in those parts of the Himalayas last for only hours and at times for only minutes, we pressed into service a AOP helicopter for search operations. As BM I was assigned the task to get airborne from Gangtok. At the helipad I found our own PC Bandhari (PCB) in control of the aircraft. We searched the area in all its length and breadth and some. But as the snow was not melting yet, as we were to learn later, we could not spot the missing two.

By then clouds had started gathering below us. In these places the weather changes faster than the time it takes for a couple of successive winks. Though we resisted until the last possible minute before we got trapped, reluctantly we had to abandon the search and head for base. All of a sudden it was a white and grey fluffy carpet below us stretching to the horizon. Though I didn’t see any angels around us, I had to pinch myself to ensure that we were not heading towards the pearly gates ourselves. I looked at PCB, he was cool. A CM is a CM and he was in control – I could recognize that on his face. Ha! then, so was I!!! Cool….We headed in the direction of Gangtok and as we neared the target we found a small little opening through which PCB guided the chopper down just as that too closed.  It snowed for another two days, in the forward areas.

That year it snowed in Gangtok too…I was told after decades.