Ask Cash What You Will Reviewing Books, Movies, Recipies, Places, Shops, Parenting Techniques, and My Life!

Today there was a static display of Air Force aircrafts in the Air Force Station Gorakhpur. So I finally got to see a Jaguar up close in the technical area. My immediate reaction was, “its so small”! After An-32s and IL-78s the little Jag was well…small. Then Jamshed drew my attention to all the fire power that the fighter carried. The rocket launcher, the bomb holder and the cannon gun. That kind of redeemed the plane.

Next we moved on to the microlight. It was a twoseater with the propeller and engine behind the seats open to the air. No cover of any sort over all that machinery. Rehaan’s loudly proclaimed reaction was,”It’s a baby plane and its broken”. There was a helicopter on display which was hurriedly removed because it had to proceed on flood relief duties in Hyderabad. Well, that’s consistent with the inconsistency called Fauji Life.

So on a day when no flying was planned we got to see three helicopters getting airborne. Then we went to Jamshed’s office. It is located right below the ATC. And I finally got to see the inside of an ATC. There was just one officer controlling the light air traffic on the holiday. He let me hear the RT calls on the headphones. It was fun watching him in action guiding aircrafts with all kinds of instructions. Most of which were perfectly incomprehensible to me except for “affirm” and “roger” I could not figure out anything about the string of numbers that were being mentioned.

We got to see the microlight do some acrobatics for the assembled school kids. The ATC officer was very worried about the microlight as it was being flown without a flight plan. All the same considering that the station flight safety officer was piloting the craft I guess there was little to worry about. The helicopters also did a low flypast just before taking off for the flood relief. Talk about multitasking. All in a day’s work for these faujis who work silently and efficiently making the country a safer place.