KOCHI: As the flagship of the Indian Navy, aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, undocked at the Cochin Shipyard following its maiden refit, on November 5, it dispelled doubts about the capacity and capability of an Indian yard to do the behemoth’s periodic maintenance.
“Simply put, it was nothing short of a fight against the odds that made it possible,” says Madhu S. Nair, chairman and managing director of the yard.
Russian engineers, who refurbished the Soviet-era carrier for India, had ruled out the Cochin Shipyard — the only Indian yard with docking capacity and experience to carry out a refit of this scale — as a possible candidate for the job. The contention was that the dry-dock, which periodically took on the outgoing carrier INS Viraat for some 14 refits during its 29 years with the Indian Navy, was not strong enough to carry the 44,500 tonne vessel and ran short of the desired length, too, by a few metres.
But the engineers of the Cochin Shipyard and the Navy assessed the capacity of the dock, and experts from the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras, seconded their opinion after studying the strength of the dock floor. But when the vessel was to be docked, another problem cropped up.
The shipping channel did not have the desired depth of 14 metres to steer the vessel in. “A dredger owned by the Dredging Corporation of India had come for urgent repairs at the yard from Kolkata. I called up the chairman to find out if it could dredge up the channel and assured him that the dredger would be docked for maintenance as soon as the work got over. The channel was deepened in eight days flat and on the eighth day, we kept our word by docking the dredger for repair,” says Mr. Nair.
The point is, the project, being the first of its kind, threw major challenges at all the agencies involved, but concerted effort by various naval units and the ship’s crew, the yard, the DCI, the Cochin Port, and the ICTT Vallarpadam made its swift and precise execution possible. “Each agency remained committed and went beyond approaching it just from the project management point of view. There was pride at stake which left no room for any setback. So what was a logistical, technical, and security challenge was met without any hiccups,” he says.
The harbour master of the port was on the vessel to navigate it into the yard. The Cochin Shipyard had readied galvanised steel cage concrete blocks to seat the ship. “It was a test of the quality and skill of the people involved too.”
The coordinated effort clicked. A job meant to be done in 70 days was done in 43 days when Vikramaditya undocked after its first-ever cycle of maintenance.
