Look Ma! We fished out a MiG pilot
To brothers Subhas and Ashok Pandit, it had at first looked like a man at the end of a giant balloon, slowly dropping off the morning sky.
The two middle-aged farmers had earlier heard the roar of a jet aircraft as they breakfasted on puffed rice at their home by the Keleghai river in this East Midnapore hamlet, about 150km from Calcutta. It took a moment for them to realise what had happened.
“Some women who were washing utensils at a nearby pond cried out that a plane was on fire and was about to crash,” said Subhas, 48. “We ran out and saw the plane nosedive over Duria village (4km away in West Midnapore). We saw the man slowly descend from the sky, holding on to what looked like a balloon.”
It was pilot D. Mahapatra at the end of his parachute, being carried by the wind towards the Keleghai even as his MiG27 crashed into a swamp off Duria.
Subhas and Ashok, 45, ran straight towards the river. Their promptness proved lucky for Squadron Leader Mahapatra, who had ejected as his plane caught fire around 8.30am, 15 minutes after taking off from the Kalaikunda airbase, 70km away.
As he dropped on the bed of the chest-deep river, Mahapatra got entangled in his parachute and his feet got stuck in the soft, wet sand. He swayed about like a trussed-up prisoner, only the top of his body visible above the water and only his arm free to move about.
“He stood in the water and waved at us,” Subhas said. “I realised he was beckoning us to help him.”
The brothers climbed into their country boat and rowed furiously. “It took us 15 minutes to reach him. He told us in Hindi that he could not move,” Subhas said.
Both brothers got down into the water and unclasped the parachute on Mahapatra’s instructions. “He told us he could not stand any longer. We pulled him into the boat and made him lie down, using the parachute as a cushion,” Ashok said.
As they neared the bank, many enthusiastic villagers dived into the water and escorted the boat back to the shore, giving the last part of the journey a carnival atmosphere.
Mahapatra contacted Kalaikunda over Subhas’s mobile phone. Within 25 minutes, a helicopter arrived and took him away.
The pilot had left behind the parachute and some equipment with the Pandits, which the police later collected from them. The brothers have no mementoes, only memories to last a lifetime and a deep pride in rescuing the air force man.
“We are very proud because we rescued a soldier of the country, someone who protects our country. I feel as if we have done a service to the nation,” Ashok said.
Duria had collected mementoes aplenty this morning, but the police took those away too.
Thousands of people from nearby villages, alerted by the MiG’s roar and the flames from its tail, had calculated it would crash near Duria and begun running towards the village.
The plane crashed into a swamp and disappeared under the chest-deep water. Many of the villagers dived in only to shrink back at once, put off by the acrid smell of the spreading jet fuel.
A little later, though, they entered the swamp again and began hauling up parts of the fuselage. Hundreds marched triumphantly with a piece of a broken wing. The police and an air force team arrived but struggled to push the crowd back.
“The aircraft was on a routine sortie,” an Eastern Command officer said. He added that a court of inquiry would probe the accident, the 12th MiG crash in north Bengal since 2002 and the third this year.
Mahapatra could not be contacted for his comments on the rescue. Eastern Command officials said they too had been unable to speak to him at the Kalaikunda base till this evening.
