Messengers of god: Recalling the 2013 Siachen rescue operation

Watch video:A pilot Recalls One Of The Biggest Rescues At Siachen In 2013

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Three helicopters had taken off together on a supply run to Sonam, with nine pilots — six for flying and three for clearances. At about 7.40 am, one of the three choppers with two on board went down.

“The helipad size at those heights is very restricted. It’s like landing on a razor’s edge. Just enough to put your skids down,” he says. Plus, the rarified air reduces the lift of helicopters, he says, and the weather conditions combine to make every landing “a big challenge”.

Army officer of Western Command Col Saurav Schimmer, who was involved in the last big rescue at Siachen, in 2013. (Source: Express photo by Jaipal Singh)

Schimmer, who inducted the Dhruv Mark 3 helicopter into the Air Force, was sent out to locate the crashed helicopter. On his first run, he couldn’t spot it, and was told that the copter appeared to have gone into a crevasse. His first reaction was disbelief, that “a crevasse could take such a large machine and leave no sign of it”.

It was only after he had flown over the spot a couple of times that he was able to spot a 3-metre section of a rotor blade. “The snow was undisturbed!” he recalls. The helicopter had gone down 150 ft and was hidden under a bend in the crevasse.

He warned the troops at Sonam Post to not try anything that could cause the crevasse to collapse, and then flew out to get more choppers, ferrying a team of mountaineers. There was nothing to tell if the two aviators aboard were still alive.

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When the rescuers went down the crevasse, they couldn’t see anything. “Only when their Crampons (clipped to shoes for walking on snow) scraped metal did they realise they were standing on the roof of the chopper.”

It was now two hours and 45 minutes after the crash.

When the two aviators (names withheld) were pulled out, they were conscious but badly injured. Later, it was found that that they had even recorded their last messages for their families on the cockpit voice recorder.

Pointing out that every rescue in an accident at Siachen is a miracle, Schimmer says, “Both pilots were shaken. One was crying, ‘I am dead, please save me’. I had to slap him.” The other was “totally silent”.

The men were given a heavy dose of morphine, and then Schimmer flew out with one of them to Thoise. By the time he was unloaded off the plane and it was time to go back for the second injured man, the weather had packed up.

“It started snowing heavily. I asked my co-pilot if he was willing to go in again. I told him I had updated my GPS during the last sortie and knew where to land. He agreed,” says Schimmer.
Luck also had a lot to do with it. Of the nine pilots who set out that day, the two whose helicopter crashed were the only ones wearing the full winter kit. Plus, a mountaineering team had just returned the previous day and was fully acclimatised to go into the rescue mission while an AN-32 transport aircraft of the IAF was parked in Thoise for quick evacuation.

Underlining the huge responsibility an aviation pilot bears, Schimmer says, “The eyes of the infantry speak a lot to you when you are landing your helicopter. This silent communication is why an aviator takes a little more risk than he would otherwise… The supplies, the mail, the evacuation, everything is done by helicopters. The troops on the ground treat aviation pilots as messengers of gods.”

Both the aviators Schimmer helped rescue that day have since recovered, and are flying again.