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archive: With flying colours

With flying colours

Ranjit Bhushan, Srinagar
Outlook
July 19, 1999


    Title: With flying colours
    Author: Ranjit Bhushan, Srinagar
    Publication: Outlook
    Date: July 19, 1999 
    
    Then Flying Officer Gunjan Saxena conducted her first sortie into the
    Kargil zone last week, she created history in defence.  She became the
    first Indian woman to fly into combat zone, thereby opening up a vista
    which till now has traditionally been a male preserve.
    
    "I could not wait to be called," says Saxena, based in Udhampur, but
    currently stationed at the operational zone in Srinagar.  In the 10
    daring sorties she has undertaken during the past one week on the
    Cheetah helicopter of the Indian Air Force (IAF), she has dropped
    vital supplies to troops at higher points in the Dras and Batalik
    sectors, picked up the dead and wounded from jagged mountain edges
    where flying a chopper requires an inordinate amount of skill, all
    while escaping Pakistani gunfire and missiles from below.
    
    The real challenge, according to her, was to go into operations which
    the IAF gave her a chance to do.  "There is no problem about gender as
    all of us get the same opportunities.  Initially the people were a
    little stunned," she recalls with a laugh, "but now they are used to
    it."
    
    Saxena has been having a good share of the action in the last two
    weeks.  And the Cheetah she has been flying has had a key role in the
    operations because of its manoeuverability.  "That is the advantage
    with Cheetah.  It is such a light chopper that it can virtually land
    and take off from anywhere," she points out.  But operating choppers
    can be tough business in the mountains.  For one, going into such
    combat entails the danger of the chopper being shot down.  Saxena is
    prepared for that.  On board she carries an AK assault rifle and a
    smaller pistol.
    
    "There is an element of thrill and challenge in this that is not
    possible in commercial flying," says Saxena, who at 24 has already
    spent three years in the air-force.  After graduating from Delhi's
    Hansrai College, the air force was enlisting women pilots and Saxena,
    whose father and brother are in the army, opted for what seemed like a
    natural vocation.  Thus in 1994, she became one of the 25 young women
    comprising the first batch of women IAF trainee pilots.
    
    Saxena has already logged 650 flying hours including 400 hours as
    captain and the rest as co-pilot and trainee.  While on training, the
    recruits had the option to go in either for choppers or for transport
    planes.  Saxena opted for the former.  "This was a new area of work
    and it fascinated me."
    
    Her ambition?  To keep on flying, logging in more and more hours and
    going into combat whenever duty calls.  Kargil was just the first test
    case she succeeded in.  And how.
    



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