A Year After, This Air Warrior Recollects Chaos of the Flood-ravaged Uttarakhand By Tiki Rajwi - THIRUVANANTHAPURAM 07th May 2014 “It was a strange situation, and a viciously difficult one to handle: no place to land the helicopters, the sheer vastness of the tragedy... In the beginning not everyone was aware of the extent of the disaster,’’ is how Air Marshal S R K Nair, the officer who co-ordinated ‘Operation Rahat’, the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) phenomenal rescue effort, remembers the chaos of flood-ravaged Uttarakhand. The Uttarakhand tragedy will turn a year old in June, and the co-ordinator of ‘Operation Rahat’ has a new assignment. The Air Marshal, who belongs to Sasthamangalam in Thiruvananthapuram, took over as Senior Air Staff Officer (SASO), Headquarters Training Command, at Bangalore, on Monday. ‘Op Rahat’ had S R K Nair spending a whole month in Uttarakhand, where hundreds perished and several thousands were left battered and homeless in a matter of days. ‘’We were asked to send helicopters of all sizes, as no one knew what could land where. So we deployed the smallest ones to the largest,’’ the officer said over phone from Bangalore. Once the chilling enormity of the disaster revealed itself, he was asked to move to Uttarakhand to co-ordinate the relief work. Two factors made his task a punishing one. ‘’One, there were multiple organisations involved, the civil administration, the army, air force, NGOs and the NDRF to name a few. Two, the vastness of the disaster,’’ he said. That ‘Operation Rahat’ could save 25,000 lives at the end of the day stands testimony to the dedication of men such as him and the daring IAF pilots. ‘Rahat’ also became the biggest rescue operation undertaken by the IAF. Challenges, however, are nothing new for this man who got hooked to flying during his NCC days in Thiruvananthapuram. In 2003, he flew a giant Ilyushin-76 transport aircraft from Alaska to the North Pole and back. The Russian-built plane thus became the first Indian aircraft to see the North Pole. The historic flight took a backbreaking nine hours and forty minutes, but was worth every second of it. ‘’I was in Alaska leading a team in an exercise. The IL-76s are great planes. We used them extensively in Sri Lanka (Op Pawan) and Maldives (Op Cactus),’’ said the Air Marshal, a veteran of the two military operations and also later ones like Op Parakram and Op Safed Sagar (Kargil). Incidentally, the anniversary of his compelling North Pole mission also falls in June. Flying all the way to Alaska for the exercise also offered him that rare opportunity to circumnavigate the globe. ‘’We took the IL-76 to Alaska via Malaysia, flying east. After the event, we returned via Canada, crossed the Atlantic to the UK and from there to the Middle East and finally home,’’ he recalled. Commissioned into the transport stream of IAF in 1980, Nair played a key role in commencing IAF’s flying operations to Daulat Beg Oldi in Ladakh, the highest airstrip in the world. He himself landed an Antonov-32, another of IAF’s Russian-made transporters, there. A recipient of the Vayu Sena Medal and the Ati Vishisht Seva Medal, Nair has held several key posts, the last one being Chief of Air Staff Operations (Transport and Helicopter) at Air HQ. He is married to Geetanjali and the couple has a daughter, Karthika Nair.
Posted on: Wed, 07 May 2014 15:50:15 +0000
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