AFVOA Newsletter May 2020

Section 3 - Memoirs Newsletter No. 1 / 2020 P a g e 29 | 101 Since our aircraft had unspent gun ammunition, I asked the FAC for a suitable secondary target. I got an odd response from the FAC to fire at “Diu Town” and my repeated requests for a specific target got the same answer. As it was patently ill- justified to harm our own civil population and was not a designated military target of the operations, I decided to ignore it and flew around searching for a suitable military target. I then noticed a fast patrol boat of medium size heading out from the Fort on the eastern side of the island towards an Indian Navy ship standing about two miles offshore towards the South West. (The ship was INS Delhi as revealed later). I then descended to about 200 feet and flew towards the patrol boat from East to West to identify whether the boat was friendly or hostile. As I was closing in, the boat and the Fort opened fire at me. This was very evident as the enemy had interspersed “tracer” bullets in their gun ammunition and hence the trail was clearly visible to me. It was too late to open fire from my side and I passed over to the west luckily unharmed. My No 2 was also not hit. I immediately declared the target as hostile and decided to attack. I planned to execute the attack heading towards the North-east so that I could avoid flying over the gun emplacements of the Fort and, if my aircraft was hit, I might be able to bail out over land in Indian territory behind our Army lines. Accordingly, I turned around in a left-hand circuit going over the sea at low level and went into a steep pull-up attack rolling in towards the target in a 10 to 12-degree dive. Although the patrol boat had now started evasive zig-zagging whilst firing its guns, I held my aim steady and ensured a long burst from my guns hit the target. When I reached a safe distance away, I turned around and saw the patrol boat had come to a standstill but had not been destroyed, since the ball ammunition of our guns had no explosive characteristic. I glanced at my fuel gauge and decided that I could squeeze in one more quick attack. I used a tighter attack pattern starting the firing at a slightly longer distance and kept all four guns blazing till pulling out of the dive. The stationary target made aiming easier to put the whole burst right into the target. It was when I glanced back after the pull-out that I saw a huge column of smoke in mushroom form and wondered why there was such a huge explosion. Since the fuel state was a cause of concern, I set course towards base. My wingman Boondi also was keeping up well with me all the while. We climbed up to medium height and using optimum fuel consumption settings landed safely at base with rather low fuel state. Our flying time for the sortie was over one hour. On inspection, my aircraft was seen to have sustained some minor damages repairable on site.