February 7, 1968. At the Air Monitoring Control Centre (AMCC) in Udhampur, Jammu and Kashmir, Ramesh Chandra Aggarwal, a young transport pilot with the Indian Air Force (IAF), was in charge of monitoring radio transmissions of aircraft flying in the northern sector. A couple of Soviet-era Antonov AN-12s were on routine sorties that day — for Aggarwal, a year into his job, it was just another day of his non-flying duty. “That morning, there had been an AN-12 sortie from Chandigarh to Leh and back. In the afternoon, another aircraft took off from Chandigarh to Leh. The weather was clear in the morning, but the skies were overcast by afternoon. Sometime after it took off, the pilot told the Leh airfield authorities that he was turning back to Chandigarh. That was the last we heard from him,” says Aggarwal, then a 23-year-old Pilot Officer. When the Udhampur AMCC did not hear from the aircraft for a long time, they contacted the Chandigarh air traffic control (ATC) to check if it had landed. “When they said it had not, panic set in,” recalls Aggarwal, now 79. Unknown to the IAF then, the AN-12, serial number Bravo Lima 534, had crashed into a mountain in Spiti Valley, way off course, around 3 pm. All 98 persons onboard — six IAF crew members and 92 Army personnel — were killed. Wing Commander C S Grewal (retired) says the plane was also carrying Rs 30 lakh in cash that was being taken to the government treasury in Leh. For years, the AN-12 and its last flight remained one of the most enduring mysteries in India's aviation history. Until July 2003, when a team from the Manali-based Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Mountaineering and Allied Sports chanced upon the crash site and the remains of a soldier. Sepoy Beli Ram’s body was the first to be recovered from the chilling heights of Dhaka glacier in Himachal Pradesh’s Lahaul-Spiti region. A full 35 years after the crash, there was finally confirmation of the AN-12's crash. Since then, the Army’s Dogra Scouts has taken over the search as part of Operation Punarutthan-1 (Resurrection), its members scouring the glacier, looking for more remains of the aircraft and the victims. Over the years, the teams found remains of five more bodies: Pioneer Hardas Singh, Lance Naik Kamal Singh, Craftsman M N Phukan, and Havildar Jagmal Singh. Then, on September 29 this year, they made more headway: the remains of four more persons who were on the AN-12 — Sepoy Narayan Singh, Pioneer Malkan Singh, and Craftsmen Thomas Charan and Munshi — were recovered from the glacier area. But the snow held deep secrets. Decades later, little is known about the flight and its ill-fated journey. The morning of flight Pran Nath Malhotra, Squadron Leader, 25 Squadron ‘Himalayan Eagles’, had just completed a sortie from Chandigarh to Leh and back and was about to ride off the base on his scooter. He was to have lunch with his wife Shammi and their two young sons. Over five decades later, Sqn Ldr Malhotra’s son Sajid Malhotra talks of his father was never meant to be the co-pilot on the ill-fated flight. “As he was leaving the base, the co-pilot scheduled to fly the afternoon sortie to Leh asked him to fill in for him, saying his child was ill. Initially, my father declined. He told the co-pilot the afternoon sortie was a short hop and that he would be back in time to be with his child. Then, for reasons best known to him, he agreed to fill in for the other co-pilot,” Sajid, then four, tells The Indian Express over telephone from Cincinnati, US. Also on the flight was navigator Flight Lieutenant Man Singh Bains. Wg Cdr D S Bajwa (retd), himself a navigator, recalls seeing Flt Lt Bains zip around the 25 Squadron area on a scooter on the morning of the crash. “I called out to him, but he did not hear me. When he came to the squadron cafeteria later, I mentioned that I had waved to him. He said his mind was preoccupied,” he says. The Chandigarh Air Force Station was a hive of activity that day, recalls Wg Cdr Grewal, then a newly commissioned IAF transport pilot. “Some Gnat fighter pilots from the Ambala airbase had come over to fly the sorties to Leh, hoping to complete their annual quota of flying hours. But they missed the afternoon sortie since the flight was full. When the Captain, Flt Lt Harkewal Singh, taxied off without them, some Gnat pilots even expressed their annoyance,” says Wg Cdr Grewal, talking how the Gnat fighter pilots had a providential escape. The AN-12 takes off At 1.56 pm, the aircraft took off from Chandigarh packed to capacity with the crew, the Army troops and their personal equipment and money for the treasury. Inducted into the IAF just a few years earlier, the Soviet-made bird could carry 100 personnel, besides the crew. There were 98 people aboard that day, including the pilot, co-pilot, navigator, flight engineer and flight gunner. Most troops were from the Army Service Corps, Corps of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and the Army Medical Corps, besides some from the Pioneer Corps and military intelligence. There were four Army officers too. As the minutes progressed, the weather in Leh started worsening. Records collated by the India Meteorological Department for January and February 1968 later showed at least six western disturbances hitting J&K during these two months, including one severe weather system in January that cut off Srinagar from the rest of the country due to heavy snowfall. Similar weather conditions, though less severe, prevailed during the first week of February. But the plane was in expert hands: Pilot Flt Lt Harkewal Singh, who was in his 30s and the recent winner of the Vayu Sena Medal for exceptional flying in the north-east, was its Captain, and Sqn Ldr Malhotra, also in his 30s and had recently converted from the Packet (a cargo aircraft) to AN-12, the co-pilot. Of the 3,441 flying hours under Flt Lt Harkewal Singh's belt on Dakota and AN-12 aircraft, 2,255 hours were in the Northeast sector under challenging conditions. A graduate of the ‘Bravo’ Squadron of the Joint Services Wing, as the National Defence Academy (NDA) was then known, Flt Lt Harkewal Singh was commissioned in the IAF in 1958. At the time of the crash, he was up for promotion to Squadron Leader. Helping them navigate the rapidly deteriorating weather in Ladakh was Flt Lt Bains, who was in his late 20s. Barely married for two years, he had served in the force for nearly six years at the time of the crash. The flight goes missing With no news of the AN-12, an IAF aircraft was deployed to search for the missing aircraft, but bad weather forced it to return to the Chandigarh base. Sajid says his father taking the place of another pilot resulted in some confusion at first. “Squadron records initially showed that the other pilot had gone on the sortie. When the aircraft was declared missing, senior officers rushed to his residence to inform his family — only to find him at the door. He told them that my father had taken his place,” he says. Sajid says his mother could not “grasp the enormity of what it meant for an aircraft to go missing in that region. She already had her hands full with two young children — my brother was to turn one in March that year”. While records of the 1968 incident are scarce, the Lok Sabha archives show on February 13, 1968, then Defence Minister Swaran Singh shared with MPs preliminary information on the missing aircraft. “I regret to inform the House that an IAF transport aircraft is missing since 1454 hours on the 7th February 1968 on its way from Leh to Chandigarh and is still untraced. The aircraft was on a normal air maintenance sortie from Chandigarh to Leh. It took off from Chandigarh at 1356 hours,” he had said. He informed the House that the Captain, who had covered approximately three-fourths of the distance to Leh, was informed by the Leh airfield authorities that the weather there was unfavourable for landing. “The Captain, therefore, decided to return to Chandigarh. A little later, the Captain informed the ground control that he was about 75 miles from Chandigarh. Thereafter, there was no contact with the aircraft. The aircraft had approximately 2.5 hours of fuel left,” he had said, adding that civil and Army authorities in the area had been alerted, and that search operations would be intensified as soon as the weather cleared. More attempts to look for the missing AN-12 were made in days that followed, but inclement conditions forced the suspension of all search operations. Families shattered As the missing plane upended the lives of the affected families, the rumours only made it worse. “There were whispers that the plane was forced to land in Pakistan and that all passengers were imprisoned there. My mother would write letters to my father but not post them. Where would she have sent them anyway? When I asked her why she did not remarry, she said my father would have done the same had she gone missing,” says Sqn Ldr Malhotra’s son Sajid. Flt Lt Harkewal Singh, the captain of the flight, was survived by his siblings, who kept waiting for some news of the wreckage so they could get closure. Four years after the crash, navigator Flt Lt Bains’s wife Parminder and their young son Ritchie left Chandigarh and moved to Canada. His aged parents, who ended up receiving his Vayu Sena Medal posthumously, kept visiting gurdwaras and deras (religious organisations) in the hope of finding him alive. While Flt Lt Bains's father died in 1977, his mother passed away in 1983. His five siblings are settled in the US and the UK. Co-pilot Sqn Ldr Malhotra’s son Sajid says, “My mother received a meagre pension — just enough to survive on — but President V V Giri’s wife ensured that she was allotted a gas agency in Faridabad. My brother and I were put in a boarding school.” After the 2003 discovery of the remains, Sqn Ldr Malhotra was finally declared “presumed dead”. A change in the pension plans promised higher pension for death in operational areas with effect from 1996. Since it included deaths in air missions in forward areas, his wife Shammi applied for it. However, her claim was rejected on grounds that the 1968 crash did not qualify as per the “cut-off date of 1996”. Sajid says his mother finally won her claims case in early September 2024 in the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT). The unanswered questions Despite the discovery of the aircraft’s wreckage in 2003, the reason behind the crash remains a mystery to date. Though the IAF has not yet made public the report of its Court of Inquiry on the crash, its transport pilots have over the years had their own theories. “The aircraft hit a mountaintop around 30 miles east of the established track. The AN-12 had limited oxygen supply onboard and it is possible that they went off course due to the bad weather and ran low on oxygen, which caused the crash,” says transport pilot Group Captain Aggarwal. Wg Cdr Grewal, who has flown on the Chandigarh-Leh sector for several years, says heavy winds due to the western disturbance may have caused the aircraft to veer off course. “I don’t think the crew was even aware of it. They may have descended thinking they had crossed the highest mountains in the area when, in reality, they were headed straight for a peak.” With the remains of just nine of the 98 men found, there is no closure yet for most families. “I remember feeling apprehensive each summer, as the snow melted rapidly, hoping my father’s remains would be found. The crash spot has been known for over 20 years now. Efforts should be made to recover the remaining bodies,” says Sajid. He adds, “I would request the IAF to take some of us over the crash site in a helicopter so we can shower some flowers there for our peace of mind. I am sure my father did not mind dying in the mountains he loved to fly over.”
