When the misty Nilgiris Mountain turned mysterious

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. 
But I have promises to keep, 
and miles to go before I sleep. – Robert Frost

Posting this episode in the first week of December is purely coincidental, though December was the month of both the air crashes narrated here.

Prologue

The magical charm that the Nilgiris in the Tamil Nadu segment of the Western Ghats effuse among the national and international travelers is something to be seen and believed, felt and rejoiced. It is estimated that tourist arrival to the Nilgiris stood at 17 lakh during 2021, of which significant numbers are from other parts of the world. Popularly known as the Queen of Hills, the panoramic landscape of Blue Mountain inspires awe in everyone. One is struck with the mere sight of the varied features that the mountains sport. Be it the rolling grassy downs in the plateau, punctuated with verdant ever green sholas, peat bogs and swamps, the steep slopes summated with peaks, the valleys of astounding depths, the rivers meandering along the valley bottoms, the waterfalls cascading through the rugged cliffs, a myriad water bodies, mosaic of man-made tree, tea, coffee and other plantations, an assortment of agri-horticultural crops on the tamed lands, the hill country offers the most scintillating views to the visitors. The mist clad mountain peaks and the valleys in the winter months particularly provide the traveler with fabulous moments of thrill and excitement. 
    But how these misty hill peaks and valleys could turn into mysterious death traps for air-borne carriers forms the thread of this episode. I intend to take the readers through two of the worst avian disasters that happened in the Nilgiri hills with a gap of over five decades.

Trouble in the air

On the 13th December 1950, an Air India Douglas C-47 B Dakota (Image) on its scheduled flight was cruising at normal speed from Bangalore to Coimbatore for a stopover before it was to further proceed to Tiruvananthapuram, its destination. The scheduled time of landing at Coimbatore was 10.24 AM. The plane had 17 passengers including foreigners and four crew members on board in all. The crew Captain Andrew Wiseman, co-pilot Ramnath Narayan Iyer and radio officer Appu Shenoy were in contact with the control room. With just 12 minutes left to land at Coimbatore, the communication from the plane got suddenly disconnected and the flight went missing. At that time, the air craft was flying over the picturesque north eastern slope landscape of the Nilgiri mountains with Rangasamy pillar jutting out to the sky. 
    

    The forest guards gave a tip off that the plane had crashed, following which the army personnel from the Defence Service Staff College at Wellington near Conoor were called in. Over a hundred officers and sepoys led by Lt. Col. Mukherjee comprised the search party. The irony in the whole sequence of events was that a ‘danger caution report about low clouds over Coimbatore’ issued by the Coimbatore observatory and the notice of ‘an aircraft missing’ issued by the Coimbatore airport was received in Madras only at 10.40 AM, much later than the flight went incommunicado. Later in the day, search planes set out from Madras, Bangalore and Coimbatore flew along the entire route but reported low cloud, bad weather and poor visibility in the Nilgiri ranges and returned to their bases without any success of locating the plane.

Treacherous track
Archival records from the Hindu newspaper revealed that the mountainous terrain with fairly dense vegetation, heavy elephant and bison movement and other wildlife disturbance, coupled with bad weather and rains proved difficult for the rescue operation. Kil-Kotagiri village, the nearest habitation was eight miles away from the crash site. There were no mobile phones or any other faster communication modes those days, except perhaps the wireless network of the military and police. The military search party and the medical team found the wreckage only six days after the accident on December 19 in a rocky valley of Denad reserve forest. A Forest Guard Kuttappa Kurup and a washer man were the first to spot the wreckage. The party had to crawl one and a half miles to reach the spot to find the plane completely disintegrated into bits and pieces of fuselage all over the place and the bodies in a highly decomposed state below Rangaswami hill (Rangasamy Pillar from Kodanadu view point). Belongings of the passengers and the postal mails were lying scattered over few hundred metres around. As removing the bodies from the spot became impossible owing to the tough and perilous terrain, an inquest was conducted on the spot.

    

    It was obvious that the weather condition in the area was dangerously bad, as revealed from the meteorological warning. With no time to send a SOS message or anything of that sort, the wing of the plane probably dashed against the Rangasamy Pillar, a vertical cliff on the southern edge of north-eastern slope of Nilgiris.  A report filed by Union Minister of State for Communications Khurshid Lal on December 21, 1950 indicated that ‘the accident happened due to bad weather.’ The aviation safety net data base which routinely registers all the mishaps connected with the air- carriers subsequently recorded that the cause of the mishap was due to navigation error, when the plane hit high ground in the Nilgiri Mountain. The data base also indicates that of the Douglas C-47 B Dakota aircrafts in operation, the Nilgiri mishap of 1950 was 100th worst accident across countries and the seventh worst in India. 

Many paradoxes
Abraham Wald, a Professor of Statistics at Columbia University and his wife were among the casualties. He was travelling in India at the invitation of the Indian Government, which had arranged for an extensive lecture tour in the country. Wald was a member of the Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University during World War II, where he applied his statistical skills to various wartime problems. One of the problems that the SRG worked on was to examine the distribution of damage to aircraft returning after flying missions to provide advice on how to minimize bomber losses due to enemy fire. Wald derived a useful means of estimating the damage distribution for all aircraft that flew from the data on the damage distribution of all aircraft that returned. His work is considered seminal in the discipline of operational research, which was then fledgling. Dharmalingam Venugopal, honorary director, Nilgiri Documentation Centre noted that Prof. Wald’s work had played a key role in the Allied victory in the Second World War. In an obituary reference to Mark Wald’s untimely demise, one of his co researchers Oskar Morgenstern wrote in the journal ‘Econometrica’, published by The Econometric Society: ‘…Thus suddenly in a remote and wild corner of a foreign land ended one of the brilliant careers of the social sciences…’. It was paradoxical that a researcher who worked on statistical modeling on minimizing bomber losses in war planes from enemy fire met his unfortunate end in a civilian air crash.
    Some fifty three years after the accident, during my official tenure as Conservator of Forests of Coimbatore Circle, having administrative jurisdiction over the forests of Nilgiris, I had an occasion to trek to the upper part of Denad Reserve Forest in connection with an inspection tour of afforestation works undertaken there. Accompanied by the District Forest Officer and his staff, I went in the early morning itself when fog still covered the Denad forests. After a strenuous walk around the shola plantation, when we were sitting on a sheet rock refreshing over a cup of tea, forest staff drew my attention to the nearby Rangaswamy pillar. A thin layer of mist enveloped the peak. I clicked a picture of the same (Image).

    They began recounting as to how this mammoth granite precipice brought down a commercial airplane on a winter day several years back. I checked my watch and the time was 10.10 AM on the 11th January 2003. When I attempt to reconstruct one of the worst ever avian tragedies browsing through ‘google search’, I was wonderstruck by the sheer coincidence of the date and time when I was sitting close to the site of the mishap. Just two days before 13th January, the date of the crash but almost the same time in the morning. It has taken 20 years hence to pen my thoughts on the havoc, particularly as another air accident with devastating consequences occurred in the forest area of very same Nilgiri Mountains under somewhat similar circumstances in 2021.

Ill luck that struck the high profile chopper sortie
On the morning of 8th December 2021, India’s Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Bipin Rawat, his wife Madhulika Rawat and 12 other army personnel that included four crew members boarded the Indian Air Force (IAF) Mi 17 V5 helicopter from Sulur airbase at 11.45 AM for their flight to Wellington airbase. Rawat was made the India's first CDS, an office set up in January 2020 to improve coordination between the army, navy and air force. Bipin Rawat's defence advisor Brigadier LS Lidder, staff officer to the Chief of Defence Staff, Lt Col Harjinder Singh were among the officers present. Wing Commander Prithvi Singh Chauhan along with group captain Varun Singh was flying the chopper. The CDS was on his way to Defence Staff College in Wellington near Conoor where he was slated to participate in an event with Chief of Army Staff M.M. Naravane later in the day. 
    Minutes before the copter was scheduled to reach its destination, the Sulur airbase control room lost contact with the chopper. Visuals of the helicopter, captured by locals before the crash had shown that the chopper was flying at a low altitude and it was cloudy. It crashed in a forested tract near Katteri- Nanjappanchathiram area amid heavy mist around 12:20 PM, barely eight minutes before its scheduled landing at Wellington. Initial reports suggest that the accident spot was covered in thick mist and the mishap reportedly happened due to low visibility, caused by foggy conditions. Eye witnesses explained to the media that the helicopter that was flying low suddenly came crashing against the tall trees. Images from the site of the crash showed many top-broken trees at the location and massive flames rising from the battered chopper (Image). Locals rushed for immediate help but couldn’t reach near due to the flames fanning out. Bodies were seen downhill. Several teams, including local military officers, civilian officials reached the site for search and rescue operations. In contrast to the air accident that happened almost seven decades ago where the search parties were able to locate the wreckage only after a week, the advancement of technology has made it possible for the locals to record the live moments of the ill-fated helicopter entering a thick cloud formation. So also the launch of search and rescue mission, which commenced within minutes after the incident.

Striking similarities
While 13 of those on board succumbed to the crash the same day, the only survivor Captain Varun Singh battled for his life in Wellington Military hospital and later in the Bangaluru Military hospital for nearly seven days before he too died. The Indian Air Force promptly ordered an inquiry to ascertain the cause of the accident.
    A year into the tragedy, preliminary report of Defence Ministry’s tri-service investigation into the fatal crash of the Mi-17V5, released in January 2022 has ruled out mechanical failure, sabotage or negligence as the cause of the accident. Mi17 V5 is considered as the most technically advanced transport helicopter that incorporates the best engineering solutions from previous generations of helicopters (Image). It is equipped with the latest generation of night vision devises and weather radar. The helicopter is battle-proven and 60 countries across the globe use it, which is in use by the Indian Air Force since 2012.

    The inquiry team concluded that the accident was a result of the helicopter entering into sudden cloud covers due to an unexpected change in the weather conditions in the forested valley, where it crashed. The change of weather led to spatial disorientation of the pilot resulting in a ‘controlled flight into terrain’ (CFIT). The CFIT generally takes place in bad weather conditions or when a flight is landing. CFIT accident refers to an accidental collision with terrain, water or obstacle of an airworthy aircraft under the flight crew’s full control without any indication of loss of control of the aircraft. In such accidents, the pilot or the crew are unaware of the danger until it is too late, according to the US Federal Aviation Administration. Such CFIT may take place because of human error or a navigation problem as well which, however, have been ruled out in this particular case in the official findings.

    The similarities between the above two episodes are somewhat striking in that both incidents occurred in the Nilgiri mountains. They happened in the morning to noon hours of December, a typical winter month, at which time the fog envelops the ground and misty conditions predominate, particularly in the higher hills and the valleys. The presence of mist gets exacerbated in a valley as was the case in both the incidents.  In both the cases, the aircrafts were flying at a fairly lower altitude, which under conditions of poor visibility went down after the wings/chopper blades knocked the physical obstructions that came in their way. Both the crashes were CFIT, a term introduced into aviation lexicon by Boeing engineers to describe an accident in which an aircraft with no mechanical problem, under pilot control is accidently flown into an obstacle, water, ground or mountain. Both these air disasters took away the life of some of the illustrious and decorated personalities.

Epilogue
People fascinated by the mystery spots around the world are for sure to have been exposed to the fables surrounding the Bermuda triangle, a.k.a Devil’s triangle, a loosely defined region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean that was prone to disappearing ships and airplanes for long. It took years of exhaustive literature investigation and intensive research by Larry Kusche, then a reference librarian, that put a full stop to the engrossing ‘manufactured mystery’ in his book ‘The Bermuda Triangle Mystery-Solved’. Are some such mysterious forces operating in the Nilgiri hills that are putting down the planes? This could be a point of inquest for the thrill seekers, I wondered after reading about Bermuda Triangle.
    A traveler to Nilgiris, particularly those who has enjoyed the ride in the Nilgiri Mountain Railway’s mini-gauge train from Mettupalayam to Conoor would not have missed the awesome views of the deep gorge of the Katteri valley in between Hill Grove and Runnymede stations (Image). 

    The steep escarpments on the southern slope of the valley, the silvery Laws Falls dropping into the Conoor river and the river further winding its way along the valley’s bottom towards Kallar are absolutely enchanting landscapes one’s eyes would love to behold forever. I too would have made over a hundred two-way road trips on the Mettupalayam- Connoor ghat in my five and half years service in the Nilgiris, enjoying the rich display of Nature’s panorama in this stretch. 

    It dawned on me only after the 2021 air catastrophe in the Nilgiris that woods are not only lovely, dark and deep (courtesy: Robert Frost) but also dangerous.