‘Unconscious pilot was floating near aircraft’ For years, Chandru Devadass had been hearing the tale of how in 1964, his grandfather, a fisherman, rescued the pilot of an aircraft that had crashed into the waters near his village on East Coast Road in Chennai. On Sunday, Chandru, a fisherman-turned-scuba diver, discovered what appears to be the same aircraft 40ft underwater. Likely to be the wreck of an Indian Navy Hawker Sea Hawk fighter jet carried aboard INS Vikrant in the 1960s, when it was stationed near Madras.Retired Navy Commodore T Hari remembers reports of a single-seater Sea Hawk being taken for a joyride by a young maintenance crew member, who then crashed into the Bay of Bengal , somewhere off the East Coast Road. "It was a Sunday, and there weren't supposed to be any fighter jets in the air. The pilot landed in the sea and was rescued by fishermen," says Hari, who confirmed, on seeing videos of the wreckage, that from certain angles it looked like the "cockpit of a Sea Hawk"."We've been looking for this wreck since 2010 because we knew approximately where it was. I've always been fascinated by this story. This weekend, the water was clear enough for us to find it," says Chandru, who discovered it 1.5km off the shore near his village Periya Neelankarai Kuppam, along with divers S B Aravind, Arun, and Timoth of Temple Adventures. "We have notified authorities," says Aravind.Pune-based retired Vice-Admiral Vinod Pasricha writes of the incident in his book 'Downwind Four Green', published in 2010. "On the Sunday of August 12, 1964, the Sea Hawk was taken out without permission by Naval Aircraft Ordnance mechanic A S Gill. He had dreams of joining the air force, but was rejected," says Pasricha, a former Sea Hawk pilot.Pasricha says that Gill, who knew how to fly, had intended to return the jet, to Meenambakkam, but didn’t know how to operate the air brakes and flaps, and ended up heading towards the sea, inadvertently becoming the only Indian to have landed a Sea Hawk on the water. “Though the plane sank, he was found floating near it,” says Pasricha, adding that Gill was sentenced to two years rigorous imprisonment and later left for Canada. The aircraft, he says, was never recovered.“I was eight years old, when my father and his friends, while returning from a morning fishing expedition also brought ashore a young man in a uniform,” says Chandru’s father Devadass, now in his 60s.“They had seen a small plane crash into the water and found the unconscious pilot floating near it. They made him rest under a tree until he regained consciousness,” says Devadass, who also remembers his father was excited because the man gave them all ?10 each.The excitement though didn’t last long, as according to Devadass, a helicopter and a swarm of officers arrived and whisked the pilot away. “The officers seemed angry and made them return the money. All we had at the end was a story,” says Devadass.

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