Any pilots out there?

One cannot miss all the talk about the modernization of Indian Defence forces, especially the Air Force – which has been going on for quite sometime I might add. With the aircrafts in commission with the forces running out of their lifetime and our indigenous aircraft manufacturers struggling to produce even basic airborne machines, various foreign players have been vying for lucrative contracts (forget the fact that the deals already signed are getting perennially delayed and facing numerous other integration issues).

Ok, forget modernization, are we equipped with even the basic tools? A couple of days back I was seriously surprised to read about the grounding of the Basic Jet Trainer fleet from HAL. It is common knowledge that we are on the look out for, or rather have been for quite sometime, on the lookout for Intermediate Jet Trainers. And I don't even want to know what the scenario is with the Advanced Jet trainers.

I should probably add a mention here about these trainer aircraft. The training of pilots for fighter aircraft is a complex job. The pilots are trained in successively more complex aircrafts – Basic, Intermediate, Advanced and then the actual fighters. This progressively fastens their reflexes and makes them capable of flying the high-end machines. So bottomline - the Trainer aircraft are indispensable for the training of Air Force pilots.

So now that we know the fundas of Jet trainers, the picture emerges – we don’t have the aircraft to train our pilots. So how are our pilots getting trained? Good question, maybe we should ask, are they getting trained at all? And my friend who is my source of info on all matters defence-oriented, says we have been operating at a deficiency of pilots for atleast a couple of years now. No wonder.

Note: I am not faulting the actual grounding of the fleet. I don’t like to have our defence personnel on unreliable machines either. One life lost is one too many.

Priorities

On watching the astounding series “Planet Earth” from the BBC stables, it struck me that in the enthralling variety that is nature, there is one theme that is recurrent. From the Hump-backed whale to the brittle starfish, there are four priorities for every living being – self-defense, food, courting, parenting. One may argue that the third and fourth are part of a single priority – an urge for propagation of one’s species. But I prefer to keep the classification this way.

The mechanisms of the living being, its features, its way of life and choice of habitat are all dictated by these four factors. So much so that these are the defining factors of a living being. Study of any organism will be comprehensive once these four are covered.

Pondering on these lines, it seems it is us humans who have complicated our priorities way too much. Probably because these four priorities do not pose as big a challenge to us as they do to our fellow creatures.