By IANS
Kozhikode : It was an act of courage and sacrifice that may not have many parallels in history. Exactly 30 years ago, five pilots of Indian Air Force’s (IAF) elite communication squadron gave up their lives to save the life of then prime minister Morarji Desai.
An epitaph on one of the gravestones at the Holy Cross Church cemetery in Muttada, Thiruvananthapuram, reads thus: Squadron Leader Mathew Cyriac, 3.12.1942 to 4.11.1977 – “To save the Prime Minister of India he heroically sacrificed himself in a nose landing air crash at Jorhat, Assam”.
Four other brave men who embraced death in the cockpit of that Tupolev 124 jet are Wing Commander Clarence D’Lima (captain of the aircraft), Wing Commander Joginder Singh, Squadron Leader V.V.S. Sankar and Flight Lieutenant O.P. Arora.
They landed the plane on its nose in a paddy field at Tekelgaon near Jorhat airfield in a valiant bid to save the prime minister. But this act of extreme gallantry remains unsung. But if you search among the martyrs and medal winners on the IAF website, you will not find any of these names there.
On that fateful day Desai was on a six-day tour to the northeast. He boarded the aircraft at New Delhi’s Palam airport Nov 4, 1977, for Jorhat in Assam.
The entourage also included the prime minister’s son Kantilal Desai, former Arunachal Pradesh chief minister P.K. Thungon and former Intelligence Bureau chief John Lobo among others.
“On that day the weather was really bad in Jorhat. It is also not known why the prime minister was allowed to proceed to Jorhat in such conditions, knowing well that the airfield is a difficult place to land even in normal conditions and, to boot, lacked facilities for night landing,” said Babu Cyriac, brother of Squadron Leader Mathew and a retired IPS officer, recounting the events.
“The officer in charge of Air Traffic Control was providing the information on cloud base after assessing it with naked eyes and his assessment may have gone wrong. All two altimeters of the plane also were faulty which must have misled the pilots during descend.
“Showing extreme presence of mind, even after the aircraft had hit tree tops, the crew nose landed the plane knowing full well that the cockpit would take the full impact and putting them in the harms way. All the VVIPs came out unscathed, except Kantilal who suffered some injuries as he had not fasten his seat belt,” Cyriac said.
The Court of Inquiry headed by Air Marshall D. Subaiah has also pointed to the possibility of a malfunctioning altimeter. Even so, as per media reports, authorities cited human error in the incident to deny the gallant pilots the status of martyrs.
“There was no question of human error. It was the bad weather that resulted in the incident. They took the maximum effort to save the prime minister. They made the landing in such a way that the cockpit took the full impact. The VIPs in the rear of the aircraft did not suffer even a scratch. That is where their sacrifice stands out. Morarji came walking out from the plane,” said Group Captain (retd) Unnikrishnan, a close friend of Squadron Leader Mathew Cyriac.
“Just before the plane crash-landed, the crew had asked the trainee engineer Balakrishnan, who was in the cockpit to move to the rear – a clear proof that the crew nose landed the plane fully knowing the consequence. Balakrishnan survived. Had they landed the plane on its belly, the aircraft would have exploded and the story would have been very different,” said Babu Cyriac.