AFOVA New Letter 2 of Year 2021

Section 7 – Panorama CV 2 No. 02 / 2021 Page 260 of 332 There is an elaborate description of how various types of Vimanas were built like Rukma, Mandala, Shakuna, Padmaka, Pushkara etc. The pilots were reffered as "Rahasya gnyanadhikari"..The one who has the secret knowledge of flying. The 32 secrets were contained in the training manual for pilots. There is mention of mercury, solar energy used as fuel. Electrical motors, gyroscopes are explained in detail. NASA started experiments on some of the aspects mentioned in this book. After sustained efforts sometime around 1978 they successfully used Mercury Vortex engines by ionising the mercury gases exactly as explained in Vaimaika Shastra. There was a big lobby ridiculing it as trash and as expected it was our own people, Indians and organizations based in our country who were in the forefront without even reading a page from the book. This is not just one book in isolation narrating about aviation knowledge in ancient India. The ancient Indian texts on Vimanas are so numerous, it would take volumes to relate what they had to say. The ancient Indians, who manufactured these ships themselves, wrote entire flight manuals on the control of the various types of Vimanas, many of which are still in existence, and some have even been translated into English. The Samara Sutradhara is a scientific treatise dealing with every possible angle of air travel in a Vimana. There are 230 stanzas dealing with the construction, take-off, cruising for thousands of miles, normal and forced landings. Now the question is, being a pilot myself, flying one of the advanced aeroplanes like Airbus 320, do I believe all this? Well there is no reason not to, for right from ancient times we had such in-depth knowledge of Astronomy, mathematics, Ayurveda, which the rest of the world has discovered in recent times. Unfortunately this knowledge was either hidden or destroyed by the barbaric invaders resulting in just a fraction of that great knowledge being available to us now. In 1202 Baktiar Khilji burnt the three storied library building in Nalanda University, nearly 90 lakh manuscripts were burnt. Similar was the fate of Takshashila and libraries of Kashmir which Adi Shankara used to write his books. We don’t know what great knowledge was buried under those burnings.