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National

Daunting task and cheerful demeanour

Manisha Jha and Sandeep Dikshit

IAF pilots come out with flying colours

PURNIA: As Wing Commander Sanjay Agarwal emerges out of cockpit of the helicopter, his ready smile instantly puts you at ease.

Having landed at the Purnia Airbase after successfully completing his fourth sortie of the day for flood relief operations over Madhepura district in Bihar, his relaxed demeanour belies any visible sign of exhaustion.

Ready for a quick chat, he says he is one of the 33 Indian Air Force personnel dispatched for the ongoing barrage-breach relief operations in north Bihar.

Daily sorties

Says 39-year-old Agarwal, who hails from Rajasthan: “Our day begins at 6 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m. It includes about four to five sorties for airdropping food and water packets. Each pilot tries to zero in on one area fully to avoid duplication of efforts by other pilots.”

“Each sortie lasts about one-and-half hours and requires us to carry a load of three tonnes each. Maintaining the weight balance of the chopper is very important for safety as well as maximising relief operations. That is why we disallowed all journalists from boarding the choppers for the first three days of our operations. Each additional person carried by us reduces our weight carrying capacity by 100 kg each.”

Bad weather aside, the pilots have to face various daunting challenges while conducting relief operations.

“Since most of the houses in the flood affected areas comprise hutments, finding a safe landing area to offload the packets becomes a problem. We cannot drop them in water or too far off as the packets tend to burst and go waste. One simply cannot trust the packaging. At the same time, flying low is also more dangerous and is mostly to be executed by experienced pilots,” he said.

“Another problem is that people are not ready to come out of their huts and be rescued because of which a lot of our effort goes waste,” he added.

Surat operation

Saving lives is not new for Wg. Cmdr. Agarwal. He recalls the case of a 50-year-old woman whom he rescued from Surat during the 2006 Gujarat floods and airdropped her at a hospital nearby. “Though our team rescued several hundreds of people during that time I remember that woman’s case because she was a serious heart patient.”

“A few years later when I visited Gujarat again I happened to recognise the building where she was airlifted and enquired about her. Unfortunately, as there was no power in the hospital that night, the woman did not make it. However, I still have a 10-minute video of that particular rescue operation given to me by somebody who shot it on the ground that time,” he said.

Avid photographer

Being an avid photographer, he regrets not being able to take aerial pictures while flying the choppers but tries to make up for it by personally collecting photographs taken by others in his chopper.

“No matter what people see on ground level claim, an aerial view provides the actual perspective of the scale of the floods in Bihar,” he said.

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