AFOVA New Letter 2 of Year 2021

Section 5 – War Diary CV 2 No. 02 / 2021 Page 48 of 332 cloudless early morning sky was all around us, brilliant with myriad colours. I had no time or inclination to enjoy the rising sun. My eyes and brain was focused on this one horrifying Sabre, streaking straight at us, with his guns blazing. Perhaps for a few seconds my brain may have wandered, asking silly questions, as to why the enemy was taking so long to shoot me down, asking for trouble, and closing in for a front gun kill. I don’t remember. The three Sabres perhaps saw me pull up and turn into them. They had two Hunters going away but four of us coming into them. So, like all fighter pilots in a close quarter aerial dog fight situation, they perhaps split, it was the natural thing to do. Perhaps two went after Lele and Buster. But what mattered to me was that one of themwas hell bent on killing me. We started to jockey in time and space for the right shooting loop. I had to kill or be killed within the next few seconds, I had no choice. This was perhaps the longest aerial combat of my life, on the very first morning of that war. Despite our numerical strength, the odds were against us because we were sluggish and weighted down with fuel and full load of munitions. However, we believed that the Hunter was a pilot’s dream in close combat. We believed that it could out turn the Sabre in killing manoeuvres with front guns. Both the Sabre and the Hunter had similar fire power, so it was a matter of who could first pull the sucker punch. So we began to manoeuvre all over the sky, chased by the Sabre. The enemy, as well as us, we pulled incredible amount of ‘g’ that rushed the blood from head to foot and made us feel five or six times heavier than our body weight, our vision blurred. The enemy was as good as us, or perhaps better. I was hyperventilating, I could hear my own breathing volubly in my earphones. I think my pulse may have shot up two and half times the normal, the adrenalin may have been copiously released into my blood stream, all of it quite usual in dog fights, in practice and in deadly real life drama.