A wing and a prayer: the day the Devon fell from the sky

Indian Express

a day ago

Commanded by Destiny: A General's Rise from Soldier to Statesman
General SM Shrinagesh
Penguin Veer
328 pages
Rs 699
The de Havilland Devon was a small, twin-engine propeller aircraft and an ideal seven-seater executive plane. It was comfortable to travel in, easy to handle, and could land and take off in reasonably small fields, particularly those that were built during the war for the India–China–Burma Theatre. A number of them had been left to us as disposal equipment at the end of the war and were being used by the Indian Air Force for executive and VIP transport; and many army officers had been moved from place to place, particularly for conferences, in this handy and versatile craft. The Devon was an excellent executive aircraft, except for a slight shortcoming — it could not maintain height on one engine.
On 3 February 1952, five senior army officers and I were returning from a conference in Lucknow in one of these Devons. To my horror, while gazing out of the window, I saw flames coming out of the port engine. The engine was obviously on fire, and the plane would explode the moment the fire reached the fuel system.
The intercommunication door between the passengers and the cockpit showed the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Biswas, attempting desperately to extinguish the fire, when suddenly, the plane flipped and plunged down to 4000 ft. As the pilot succeeded in regaining control, my eyes sprang back to the port engine. The engine had miraculously disappeared, leaving a gap without any trace of flames. By a stroke of good fortune, the engine had fallen out with its flames, without affecting the fuel tanks.
Until the reaction of relief flooded through me, I had not realised how tense I had become; but my relief was short-lived, because the Devon, I remembered, could not maintain height on one engine, and it was dusk. It would be difficult to force-land without being able to see the ground and without the ability to manoeuvre from such a low level. Flt Lt Biswas skilfully managed to locate a freshly harvested field and belly-landed us almost in the dark.
We disembarked from the plane unscathed, apparently in order of precedence, and walked to the nearest village a couple of miles away. We obtained a lift from the village to the main Lucknow Road in the only means of conveyance available — a bullock cart. By this time it was quite late, and search parties had been sent out to locate the supposedly burning aircraft. En route, we met one of these parties from Lucknow in an ambulance and explained light-headedly to the medical officer in charge that we were sorry we had no work for him.
We were invited to spend the night at the residence of the Area Commander, Major General BS Chimney. He was my colleague at Sandhurst and a good friend. He reconnoitred the area the next evening at the exact time of the accident and concluded that we had had a miraculous escape, not only because the plane had not exploded midair but also because the plane, after it had belly-landed, came to a halt just by the side of a deep well and only two yards short of a large tree. If the accident had occurred a few minutes later, it would have been too dark for the pilot to spot the harvested field below.
When we reached Maj Gen Chimney's residence, Mrs Chimney asked me how we had managed to get out of the burning plane. 'In the same order as we went in,' I replied without thinking.
Meanwhile, the SOS from the pilot mid-air, together with the fall of the burning engine, had given the impression that the aircraft had descended in flames. A message was conveyed accordingly to the people concerned in Delhi. My wife, who was expecting the party to dinner that night, began to get nervous when the aide-de-camp (ADC) failed to give her any news of the arrival of the aircraft; and when he tried (long after it was due) to suggest that the plane would be landing shortly, she said, 'Now tell me the truth, what has happened?' The ADC then confessed that the plane had caught fire mid-air soon after it had taken off.
She took some time to get over the shock. Thereafter, she asked her brother, Brigadier RK Kochhar, to come to the house immediately. Intuition made her feel that there was still hope, and she waited patiently. Among others, General Cariappa, the Commander-in-Chief, and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the deputy prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who was then visiting Delhi, called at the house. Gen Cariappa explained that search parties had been sent to locate the plane and that no effort would be spared.
Around midnight, news came through that we were all safe, and my own telephone reached my wife. She could not believe that we had escaped unscathed or without being covered in bandages, so much so that despite assuring her that all was well, she said she would not speak to me if I were merely attempting to assuage her feelings, and if she found a single scratch on me.
Flt Lt Biswas was decorated with the Ashoka Chakra, Class I, by the President for his cool-headed and adroit handling of the plane in extremely difficult circumstances. Later, the prime minister, Shri Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote to me the following comments: 'As it is all over now, one can look back upon it with composure. It is perhaps a good thing to face such contingencies provided one survives.'
Excerpted, with permission, from Penguin Random House