On February 24, Capt. Jaideep Banerjee was flying out to Kyiv from Delhi with a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. It was the second flight to be deployed as part of Operation Ganga, the central government’s mission to evacuate Indians from the troubled territory. “The war had still not broken out but hostilities were imminent. The day before, our first flight had evacuated 240 students from Kyiv. I was to fly out 257, which was my flight’s capacity,” the pilot tells The Telegraph Salt Lake from his Uniworld City apartment.
Other than the cabin crew, there were nine passengers on board — two journalists, three embassy officials and five students. “I asked the students why they were going to Ukraine amid so much uncertainty. They said they had just enrolled and the college authorities had called them over for some paperwork. ‘We will fly back by the next flight,’ they said.”
But while the flight was in Iranian airspace, a message came from the Air Traffic Control (ATC) in Tehran that missiles had started landing in Kyiv and the Ukrainian authorities had issued a Notam (Notice to Airmen) that the Ukrainian airspace was closed. We contacted Delhi and were ordered to turn back.”
Since then, no rescue flight could land in Kyiv. “They have been operating in countries bordering Ukraine and out of the war zone, making them more like normal passenger flights,” he said. Due to a standard airline policy of mitigating risk, the same pilot is generally not sent on more than one mission. So Capt. Banerjee did not have to fly any of the subsequent flights.
But rescue missions are not new to the pilot who has spent 22 years in the cockpit. “I had joined the government carrier in 1999, right after getting my licence from a Hyderabad flying school. The same year, a super cyclone hit Odisha.”
As a copilot on a relief mission, Capt. Banerjee carried tent, water purifying tablets and drinking water. More than two decades later, one memory from that operation has remained etched in his mind. “The cyclone had hit that morning itself. And I could see horizon to horizon in Bhubaneshwar. There was no vertical structure standing, be it trees or buildings.”
His second relief mission was to the Andamans after the devastating tsunami of 2004. Here the big challenge was a reduced runway. “From 10,000ft, it was down to 6,000ft in length. The colleague flying with me had been in Port Blair during the tsunami when a crack had appeared on the runway.”
The Port Blair airport, he points out, has a rare combination of a hill on one side, and sea on the other. So though we are used to small runways in the northeast states, like Mizoram and Manipur, when the runway length is reduced due to the terrain, it becomes very challenging as there is no margin for error,” he points out.
It was while flying the first Indian relief mission flight to Kathmandu after the 2015 earthquake that he understood the nature of his flight’s load. “We took among other things, a lot of excavating machinery as entire buildings had collapsed and people trapped under debris had to be dug out,” he recalls.
He had taken a passenger flight to Nepal in the morning. “Even while hovering over Gorakhpur, near the border, we could not establish contact with the Kathmandu ATC. So we could not enter their airspace and turned back.” It is on landing in Delhi that he learnt of the earthquake. Within two hours, the passengers were de-boarded, the same flight was loaded with relief materials, and he was back in the cockpit, with a National Disaster Response Force team also on board.
Another memorable flight was in May 2009 when he was the first to land in Calcutta after Cyclone Aila. “Dum Dum had been closed for a day and half before that. I flew in from Chennai. There were such continuous lightning strikes that one could read a book in the illumination of the flashes.”
But not every adventure makes headlines. “Once I had flown with a one inch hole in my winglet,” he smiles. His aircraft was struck by lighting. “There was so much turbulence anyway that I had not noticed when it happened. The damage was discovered during the post-flight walk around.” He had to fly back to Calcutta in that condition as repairs were not possible in Aizawl. “One flight is allowed with that much damage.”
He did make news locally when he tested positive for Covid-19. “I was the first resident of Uniworld City to get the virus. That was soon after flying in a Vande Bharat mission flight from Dubai and then evacuating ONGC’s offshore rig engineers from Mumbai in May 2020.” Through the lockdown, like other pilots, he crisscrossed the country transporting PPE kits, medicines, ventilators etc. which were being imported from Shanghai.
Role model
Capt. Banerjee did not have to look far for inspiration to take to the skies. “I am a second generation aviator. My father was an Air Force engineer who later joined Indian Airlines.” Nor was he the first to serve in an evacuation mission. “My father was part of the Indian team posted at Amman when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. There was an air raid and they were on the way to a bomb shelter when an Iraqi Scud missile hit the airport. They saw the flash and felt the vibration,” he says, adding that he grew up hearing these stories.
Capt. Banerjee says he and his Kyiv-bound copilot had felt bad at not being able to complete the evacuation from Ukraine as the destination was just an hour and half away when they were asked to turn around. “But orders are orders,” he shrugs.