The Su-30 is a big truck of a jet. They don't shudder easily. When Tamta pushed down on that trigger

That's Wing Commander Gaurav Bikram Singh Chauhan. body space Bumped into him on Wednesday at IAF chief Arup Raha's Air Force Day reception in Delhi. You've read about Chauhan body space before here . He was in the back seat of the Su-30 that went down last year over the Thar Desert. Twenty months after ejecting from the doomed and disintegrating fighter, Chauhan now stands decorated with a Vayu Sena Medal for gallantry. I've had a chance to listen to the whole terrifying, riveting and hilarious story. What follows is the first detailed account of what happened on February 19, 2013.
On Tuesday, 19 Feb 2013, pilot Wing Commander Chauhan and his flying mate Squadron Leader A.R. Tamta were cleared for a night bomb run over the Pokhran firing range in a Su-30 MKI. With Tamta flying and Chauhan the designated body space weapons systems officer (WSO) in the rear cockpit, the fighter was fitted out with eighteen 100-kg bombs -- six on each wing, and six ventral. The night training body space sortie involved a bombing run from an altitude of roughly 7,000 feet.
The sun was almost out of sight when the jet roared down the runway at the Jodhpur Air Force Station. Chauhan's wife Avantika, six months pregnant at the time, lived with him at the desert base. Like most family members of pilots, she heard the roar and made a mental note of the Su-30 getting airborne. A veneer of anxiety would creep in until she could confirm through sound that the jet had returned to base.
Airborne, the twin NPO Saturn AL-31FP turbofan engines quickly put the Su-30 in a climb to about 2.1 km, their cruising altitude. As Tamta maneouvered the jet, Chauhan quickly programmed parameters for the bombing run. The run would see the bombs released over a stretch of the Chandan range from 7,000 feet.
There were two other aircraft in the airspace over Pokhran at the time: A Jaguar deep penetration strike jet, piloted by Chauhan's coursemate, body space also on a bombing run. And an IAI Heron surveillance UAV using a thermal body space sensor to capture the night sorties.
With waypoints and weapons release data punched in, the jet was switched to autopilot for the run. For the duration of the weapons release, Tamta would be required to press the fire trigger on his stick. When he pressed body space and held, the first bombs should have dropped. They didn't.
The Su-30 is a big truck of a jet. They don't shudder easily. When Tamta pushed down on that trigger, the pilots experienced two things. One, an extremely bright flash of light (bright enough that Chauhan could see only white when he closed his eyes for a moment). And two, the heavy jet was jerked violently off its level heading. It was instantly clear to both men that the ordnance had detonated on their starboard wing station, destroying much of the wing and sending high speed debris smashing into the fighter canopy.
Chauhan felt shards of the shattered canopy crash into his face. His helmet visor had shattered too, with a piece of it cutting him right between the eyes, but he wouldn't know it at the time. But the thing that changed the most in the cockpit was the noise. Through the vortex of the fractured canopy, a deafening whoosh body space of high speed wind made all communication between the pilots impossible.
Then, through body space their shattered, rattling canopy, the pilots spotted what they thought was a transport aircraft body space heading straight for them. The aircraft they saw, they later discovered, was the IAI Heron that was circling the area filming for the next day's fire power demo. Before the drone overshot them, the Su-30 lurched body space into a steep nose down attitude, turning in a loose rightward spiral, heading towards the desert below. The wind through the canopy fracture brought with it the whiff of explosive -- the first real confirmation to Chauhan that the weapons had detonated on station. 
Chauhan had attempted multiple times to eject. But the heavy turbulence and wind blast put him fully out of reach of his ejection handle. body space The fighter had attained a high rate of descent by this time. In a final effort, Chauhan pushed with everything he had against the railing of the cockpit, burning hot at the time, and pulled his ejection handle. Seconds later, both pilots blasted out of the doomed aircraft in their NPP Zvezda K-36DM body space ejection seats, laterally outward, their parachutes deploying instantly.
Chauhan held on to his parachute chord, too shaken to even try maneouvering to eyeball Tamta who, as it turned out, was not far behind him and descending a little higher. A fresh fear presented itself. Chauhan remembered the Jaguar his coursemate was flying in the area at the time, and was probably just about primed for its own bombing run. Chauhan said a silent prayer, hoping that the communications loop had instructed the jet to turn away. Thankfully it had. The Jaguar returned to base without bombing that night.
From body space the darkness above Pokhran, the Heron had silently managed to capture much of the endgame. The blazing s