What Goes Up Must Come Down... Somewhere

By Aero-News Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

It's usually bad news for a junior officer when the commander of the whole armed service knows your name. We visited that fact recently with the hapless Russian fighter pilot, Valery Troyanov, who crashed in Lithuania and was thrown in jail (He was released first to house arrest, and has since gone home to Russia). The most recent officer to be threatened with the "Commander in Chief's Special Projects Officer On An Extremely Short Leash" job is an unnamed Indian Air Force pilot, who made an impression on Air Chief Marshal S. P. Tyagi and a glittering array of other brass.

Indeed, the impression was almost a literal one, as a heavy-drop load of parachute cargo from the pilot's An-32 cargo plane almost landed on the VIP reviewing stand, causing some of the brass and most of the journalists to scatter (not, apparently, including Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov and Tyagi, who stood their ground). The pallet landed just a dozen feet from the reviewing stand.

Along with Ivanov and Tyagi, the threatened spectators included Russian Ambassador Vyacheslav Trubnikov, Russian airborne troops commander Colonel General Alexander KolmakovIvanov, Indian Army chief Gen J J Singh, and some two dozen other generals and a similar number of civilians and colonels.

The point of the spectacular airborne operation was to initiate a combined Russian/Indian counterterrorist exercise, named Indra-2005. The two nations have long been allies, and the Indian forces often seem to be an unusual stew of British culture and Russian hardware, with many peculiarly Indian spices.

The exercise gave the two nations airborne and naval forces a chance to interoperate. They also were able to check certain qualification boxes for possible combined UN peacekeeping operations in the future. And the Russians noted that both nations have ongoing troubles with Islamist terrorism.

Dropping things by parachute, at the mercy of the wind, remains an inexact science, and every nation that does it is plagued by mishaps -- strayed loads, tangled chutes, and bouncing vehicles, supplies, and artillery pieces. Cargo chutes are generally much less reliable than personnel chutes, and the systems for dropping the larger loads are of necessity, more complex.

The stray Indian load included a Mahindra and Mahindra jeep mounting the Milan anti-tank missile system, and weighed over two tons. It was dropped from an Antonov An-32, a Ukrainian-made twin-engine transport. Over a hundred of these medium transports form the backbone of Indian Air Force airlift capability. The An-32 was specially developed for India by grafting much more powerful (5,100 shp) turboprop engines onto the An-26.

Six An-32s and three Russian Il-76 jet transports took part in the exercise; all the other cargo landed on target.

Ivanov laughed off the incident, saying that, "In a real war situation, you would not have pavilions with VIPs and journalists. In the event, it was a perfect drop, since the load landed neatly concealed between two dunes. I congratulate you on that."

ACM Tyagi may not be so forgiving. He has asked for a briefing from the pilot in question.

"Gust of wind," guy -- but any pilot who ever had to explain a robust landing to passengers or crew will know this one. You may still get away with it with the Air Chief Marshal, though: being a pilot himself, he probably had recourse to the "gust of wind" at some time in his career himself.

FMI: www.indianairforce.nic.in