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Posted on October 17, 2011 by Hassaan

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Experiencing Siachen War ( Part 5) By: KEVIN FEDARKO

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Hassaan

NOTE: visit www.techenlife.com for more details regarding this blog and military aviation!!

This is the last part of the exclusive report by kevin fedarko.

It was late September by now. The autumn snows had already begun, and each day the temperatures, which hovered in the thirties, seemed to drop more. We slept in the tents or in the fiberglass huts; we ate meals that Yaseen prepared by the light of a candle stuck to the lid of an oatmeal can. One morning, about an hour before the sun hit the ice, Yaseen came into the tent and beckoned me outside. “Come! Come!” It was our first clear day; the sun was turning the tops of the peaks gold. “Look at the faces of these mountains!” he marveled. “See how beautiful they are? See how special? The mountains here, they tug at your heart.” He grabbed the front of my jacket and gave it a sharp yank. “We call thiskashish, which in Urdu means Ôattraction’ or Ôpull.’ Can you feel it?”

What I felt was a low vibration coming from the rotor blades of three high-altitude Cheetah helicopters beating their way up the glacier in close formation. They looked like tiny green insects—delicate, bulb-headed dragonflies with red underbellies. This was the first of more than 17 sorties moving supplies up to the bases and posts that day.

Pakistani soldiers offering religious rituals at siachen

Our progress was slow but steady, with Captain Das gradually revealing a few things about himself as we trudged. Most Indian officers come from parts of the country that have long-standing military traditions, such as the Punjab. Das is from Bengal, a place better known for producing poetry, philosophy, and India’s first Miss Universe. He grew up in Calcutta, acting in theater companies and singing for a band called Trash Pool. He was studying to be an accountant when he abruptly decided in May 2000 to enter the Military Training Academy in Madras. Six feet tall, with dark skin and black hair, Das has the rigid bearing of an officer coupled with a sad-eyed air. He volunteered to serve on the Siachen because, as he put it, “I’d never been on anything adventurous before, and I thought it would be good.”

His post, whose name he refused to disclose, is at 19,700 feet and is one of several key positions the Indians hold above Bilafond La. It looks directly down on Tabish, the besieged Pakistani post where Captain Safdar endured the rockslide. It took Das and his squad more than two weeks to trek up the glacier from base camp; the final stretch required an ascent up ropes anchored to a 460-foot ice wall. They got there on January 21, 2002, and spent the first week getting used to the shelling.

Pakistani soldiers praying

The Pakistanis fired an average of ten rounds every 24 hours when the weather was clear—usually after lunch, but also at night. Each incoming shell announced itself with a sizzling wail. At the first sound of a barrage, Das would order his squad to take cover in a nearby ice cave while he and two other soldiers took lookout positions. Most of the shells landed in soft snow and were duds; only those that struck rock or ice would detonate—unless they were airburst shells, which have fuses timed to explode before they hit the ground. “The splinters come out sounding like a hundred people screaming,” said Das. “You have no idea where the next shell is going to land. It’s terrifying.”

By the middle of February, Das and his men had adapted to the shelling and the sleep-all-day, up-all-night routine. The cold was a different story. Even with all their clothes on—five pairs of socks, three pairs of gloves, a down jacket—they shivered miserably in their double sleeping bags. The latrine presented another problem.

“After a bunch of guys take a shit, it’s impossible to clear it away,” Das explained. “Pouring boiling water on it, or banging on it with an ice ax, won’t work—it just keeps building up. So those mounds, we would have to clean them with our machine guns. Cock an LMG—tacka-tacka-tacka—and it breaks into tiny pieces of rock-shit. They fly in the air. A couple times a week is enough.”

Soldiers raising slogans before starting their journey

In March, a cake and a white puppy with black spots made the trip up the ice wall via a gas-powered winch. The cake was for Das’s birthday; he turned 24 on March 7. The puppy was named after the post, so Das refused to tell me its name. It slept in Das’s sleeping bag and survived on butter, rice, and chocolate. During Das’s downtime, he read his way through every book in the post’s “library,” including the complete works of Jane Austen and Into Thin Air.

In April the routine took a turn for the worse. “It just kept snowing and snowing and snowing,” said Das. “It was like somebody pouring truckloads of snow on top of you.” At three o’clock one morning, a massive avalanche wiped out an entire Indian post near Das’s ridge. Five men were killed. It took the 11 survivors more than eight hours to dig themselves out, under enemy fire. “This happened right in front of my post,” said Das. “It was like the sky breaking on your head.”

On May 21, Das and his squad were relieved, and he handed his dog over to the new commander. He had spent 120 days at 19,700 feet. No mountaineer in the world can make such a claim.

I asked if he ever wanted to go back.

“Never,” he said. “Not in my life. I went up to the post hoping for some action. But to have a shell land right on top of where you are, with the splinters flying, it scares the shit out of you. Once you’ve been under fire, you never want it again.”

IT TOOK US FOUR DAYS to reach Kumar Base, which sits at a point where two other glaciers come crashing in. From the northeast, toward China, the icefall from Teram Shehr cuts a broad swath across the east side of the Siachen. From the southwest, toward Pakistan, the Lolofond Glacier descends from Bilafond La in a gentle roll. The base floats above the surface like an ice ship. At the bow and stern are two platforms that serve as helicopter pads. In the middle is a warren of dirty parachute tents and fiberglass huts connected by a lane of wooden pallets. Running down the sides are streams of refuse and thin brown smears of frozen feces. In the distance, you can see other camps rising raggedly out of the moraine, each looking like it has just been through a ruinous siege. All of these are connected to Kumar by a four-inch-thick black plastic umbilical cord known as the K2 pipeline, which snakes up the center of the glacier. Once or twice a month, the pipe bursts. The breach is usually repaired within a few hours, but a big hole can result in as much as 7,000 liters of kerosene spewing onto the ice and draining into the crevasses.

From the top of Kumar, you have a splendid view of the Siachen’s white skin, the white peaks that wall it in, and a dense ring of odd white pillars stretching out from every side of the base. These pillars are the remains of 19 years of parachute supply drops. Over time, as the ice has melted and refrozen, they have risen about five feet above the surface. Most appear to have a head, shoulders, and a torso. There are thousands of them, and from above they look disturbingly human.

This scene is bizarre enough by day, but at night it becomes truly ghastly: a frozen necropolis of trash, a Golgotha of ice haunted by the spirits of the dead. When the wind subsides and the moon rises and you gaze out at the cordon of pillars shrouded in the pleated folds of the parachutes, it looks like you’ve been encircled by an army of ghouls, as if all the soldiers slain in these mountains have risen from their icy graves and gathered before Kumar to stand in mute judgment of what they have done to one another, and to the balance of nature. “This is the most depraved thing I’ve ever seen,” Teru whispered one night. “I don’t know if this is war. But it’s definitely hell.”

There is not much cause for optimism with regard to the future of this hell. Since 1986, India and Pakistan have sat down seven times to hammer out some kind of solution to the Siachen war. Although they’ve come tantalizingly close to an agreement more than once, the talks have broken down each time, and the Kargil incursion of 1999 drove a stake through the heart of any rapprochement for the foreseeable future. What’s worse—as if this situation could possibly get any worse—an end to hostilities on the glacier is inextricably tied to perhaps the toughest geopolitical mess of all: achieving peace in Kashmir.

Meanwhile, the corrosive detritus of war keeps metastasizing. The Indian army has an impressive scheme to try to clean the glacier by building a gargantuan aerial cableway that will cart supplies up and carry waste down. And Harish Kapadia, a well-known Indian mountaineer, is trying to galvanize a grassroots campaign to turn the region into an “international peace park” that Pakistan and India would share. But that seems highly unlikely. As Colonel Kumar told me back in New Delhi: “There’s no sharing to be done. The Siachen belongs to us.”

On our final evening at Kumar Base, I sat down on a rock to watch as a storm moved in over the Saltoro. The clouds were scudding along the tops of the peaks, and the sky was bruised a deep purple. I turned to the north. Somewhere up there, over on the other side of Bilafond La, the Pakistani soldiers at Tabish were gearing up to endure another night at their post. I looked south. Farther down the glacier, the men at Sher were undoubtedly doing the same. The storm would probably clobber both posts, but for the moment, the Siachen front was very still.

And then something strange happened. The wasteland disappeared and I saw only the great peaks, the great bowl of dark sky, the great ice serpent of the glacier. The sadness and despair of our journey fell away and left only desire: the desire to strike off across the glacier toward Bilafond La and climb its ridgeline. The desire to ski down the gentle slope of the Lolofond Glacier, as Colonel Kumar had done during that magical summer of 1981. The desire to go marching off toward Indira Col, to posthole up its sugary flanks and gaze into the white wastes of China. Like Yaseen, I wanted to come here without restrictions and without confinements; to set up a base camp with some friends; to scale every peak that struck my fancy, for as long as it took me to swallow them all or be swallowed up by them.

I wanted to do all these things, and I knew that they were all impossible. The most that was possible—and this was a lot, I realized—was to feel the pull of these mountains, a pull that is powerful enough to transcend the war and the squalor and the shame of everything else that has happened here. If you go to the Siachen, the very best you can hope for is to know the meaning of kashish.

Experiencing Siachen War ( Part 3) By: KEVIN FEDARKO

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Hassaan

NOTE: visit www.techenlife.com for more details regarding this blog and military aviation!!

“We never keep track,” one captain who had served there told me, “because if one counts, he completely forgets himself.” Tabish was established during a brutal firefight in September 1987, when the Pakistanis lost a crucial high post known as Qaid, then failed to push the Indians off the neighboring ridge. Last spring, when Captain Safdar was there, Tabish’s problems were aggravated by an avalanche of rocks that damaged several bunkers. Safdar apparently acquitted himself well during this crisis.

“Your leadership was exemplary,” the C.O. announced. “Young officers like you are the reason why we continue to dominate the enemy. Officers like you are the reason why we will ultimately prevail in this war.”

Life at such forward positions is brutal, and the Indians begrudgingly admit that the Pakistanis are tough customers. “They are sitting right underneath us on an 80-degree slope,” one Indian officer who was stationed above Tabish would tell me later. “We can throw grenades just like pebbles on top of them. It really takes guts to be there.” Captain Waqas Malik, 26, who served at Tabish, grimly described the hopeless feeling of such positions. “Once a ridge has been occupied,” he said, “you require a heart with the capacity of the ocean to accept the casualties you will incur in the taking of it.”

Each high post is manned by a squad of six to 18 men commanded by a young officer, usually a captain, and space is tight—a couple of fiberglass igloos, machine-gun platforms, a latrine, and a tiny area for religious worship. Each soldier is in charge of a particular weapon: light machine guns (LMGs), mortars, anti-aircraft guns. The men stay out of sight by day and stand watch by night.

Indian soldiers

Unlike mountaineers, who usually climb during the best weather, Siachen soldiers endure the worst the mountains can throw at them, year-round. Avalanches are frequent and terrifying; their thunder is so great that it’s often impossible to distinguish from shelling. Blizzards can last 20 days. Winds reach speeds of 125 miles per hour; temperatures can plunge to minus 60 degrees. Annual snowfall exceeds 35 feet. During storms, two or three men have to shovel snow at all times. If they stop, they will never catch up and the post will be buried alive.

“Sometimes in the winter, you see nothing but white,” said Captain Jamil Salamat, 24, the medical officer at Ghyari. “And you think, Maybe I will never make it back. That is the hugeness, and the hugeness has its own effect. It’s overwhelming. The snow is like an ocean up there.”

In such extreme cold, the single most important resource is kerosene. Known as “K2 oil,” it is used for cooking, melting snow for water, thawing out frozen guns, and keeping warm. It gives off a noxious smoke that coats the igloos with grime; for months after they descend, soldiers cough up black gunk.

Survival under these conditions requires specialized equipment. There are 112 separate items in a Pakistani soldier’s high-altitude kit, including two types of oxygen canisters, three models of ice axes, three kinds of rope, 29 sizes of pitons, five different pairs of gloves, three types of socks, a puffy white down suit rated to minus 60, and a black plastic”nuclear-biological-chemical warfare face mask.” The Pakistani gear that I saw seemed to be generally low-quality stuff; most of it carried the brand name Technoworld, which no one I spoke to in the outdoor industry had ever heard of. In contrast, Indian soldiers get state-of-the-art gear from a wide range of highly specialized Western firms like Koflach, Asolo, and Black Diamond

Pakistani gunners

The monetary cost of these posts is enormous. A liter of kerosene that goes for 19 rupees in Rawalpindi costs Pakistan more than 650 rupees by the time it’s been hauled to 19,000 feet. (On the Indian side, almost every pound of supplies, including the artillery pieces, is flown in by helicopter because there are no roads on the glacier, pushing transportation costs ten times higher.) Each summer in the Ghyari sector alone, more than 35 Pakistani bases, gun positions, and fighting posts have to be stocked with some 2,000 tons of ammunition, rations, and fuel. This material is freighted to Ghyari by truck and hauled up the ice on mule and donkey trains. To prevent snowblindness, the pack animals are equipped with specially made glacier goggles. Sometimes they stumble and plummet into the crevasses. “They scream for an hour until they freeze to death,” one of the muleteers told me. “It is terrible to hear.”

Over 90 percent of the casualties on both sides are caused by weather, terrain, and what mountaineers call “objective dangers.” Above 18,000 feet, the human body cannot acclimatize and simply starts to deteriorate. Soldiers fall ill, lose their appetites, can’t sleep, and have problems with memory. Severe frostbite—all it takes is touching a gun barrel with bare hands—can result in the loss of fingers and toes. The two most serious killers are HAPE (high-altitude pulmonary edema) and HACE (high-altitude cerebral edema). Men suffering from HAPE, an accumulation of fluid in the lungs, cough up a pink froth and can be dead in a matter of hours. With HACE, fluid leaks from oxygen-starved blood vessels in the brain, causing severe swelling, headaches, hallucinations, and dementia. Untreated, HACE can kill a man within 24 hours.

Pakistani soldiers on their way to a top post

In settings like this, suffering is often transformed into legend. The Pakistanis tell of a post beyond Sia La, at nearly 22,000 feet, that is said to have three separate cracks in the ice known as Three-Man Crevasse, Five-Man Crevasse, and Eight-Man Crevasse—each named for the number of men who died falling in. Soldiers talk of men losing their minds and leaping from the posts to their deaths. Some say their tormented cries can be heard in the wind over the peaks. And then there’s the story about the platoon killed in an early battle at Bilafond La, whose bodies froze into such grotesque positions that their corpses had to be hacked into pieces before they could be placed in helicopter panniers and brought down for return to their families.

Whether such tales are true is less important than what they symbolize about the futility of Siachen duty. “From what I’ve read, no one has ever been stupid enough to fight at this level before,” an officer at Ghyari remarked one afternoon when none of his colleagues were within earshot. “I hope it won’t be repeated again, because it’s a waste. A big, bloody waste.”

THE ARTILLERY FIRE HAD BEEN so fierce during the summer of 2002 that the Pakistani top brass delayed our trek to the front. But on our third day at Ghyari, they gave the go-ahead: We would be escorted by a squad of eight soldiers who had been ordered to relieve Captain Yasin Rafiq, the commander of a post called Sher.

the snow is like ocean up there. snipers eye view from SHER POST Pakistan

Sher is perched at 19,600 feet on a ridge at the head of the Chumik Glacier, a short, steep tributary that comes crashing down into the Bilafond Glacier from the northeast and is one of the few Pakistani positions on the Saltoro that commands the high ground. It took us three days to hike there. On the third day, we reached a field of metal shards from exploded Indian artillery shells. Soaring above us was a huge crescent-shaped saddle. To get to its crest—where we could see the tiny black spot that was Sher—we had to ascend a thousand-foot snow-and-ice wall, pulling ourselves up on fixed ropes.

At the top, we caught our breath beside an 81mm mortar tube, then stepped into the post itself. Sher is only about 12 feet wide and 40 feet long. On one side are two fiberglass igloos where the men eat, cook, and sleep. On the other are a hulking 14.5mm Chinese-made anti-aircraft gun, a machine-gun bunker, and, higher up the ridge, a tiny observation post. We hobbled across 12 feet of frozen mud, stepped up to a stretch of rope serving as a guardrail, and stared down a 3,500-foot drop to the Indian front lines.

We were greeted by Captain Yasin, 29, who had been at his post for 82 days. Yasin pointed out an Indian supply base less than three miles away on the glacier below (from this distance, it was a brown spot on the ice), an Indian seasonal observation post (which we couldn’t see), and an Indian helicopter route. He announced grandly that this was the first time foreigners had been permitted to visit Sher.

Pakistani soldier offering prayer

Above the post, the ridge rose to a massive double peak called Naveed Top. In April 1989, the Indian army launched a mission known as Operation Ibex; its aim was to capture this peak and force the Pakistanis to vacate the entire upper portion of the Chumik Glacier. Three teams of Pakistani soldiers attempted to reach the summit to thwart the Indian operation and failed; one team was wiped out by an avalanche, the others halted by overhanging seracs. A last-ditch decision was made to airlift troops to a point just below the top of the 22,185-foot mountain using French Lama helicopters designed to fly no higher than 21,000 feet.

The air was so thin, the pilots feared they would crash if they attempted to hover. So after stripping as much excess weight as they could, they used a maneuver called a “running drop,” which required an individual soldier dangling from the bottom to be dropped onto the peak as they passed over. The first to make it was a 29-year-old lieutenant named Naveed-ur-Rehman. He was soon joined by a sergeant named Mohammed Yakub. But then a storm blew in and both men were forced to huddle on the mountain without supplies for two nights.

“The wind was so strong,” Naveed, who is now a major, later told me, “that we had to dig in our heels to avoid being carried away.” Over the next 40 days, six choppers relayed 86 soldiers and 38 tons of supplies onto the peak. Two Pakistani soldiers died and 30 were wounded during the defense of Naveed Top. That May—after the Indian advance was halted by a massive avalanche that killed a large number of their troops—both sides agreed to demilitarize the summit.

Or so say the Pakistanis. To this day, the Indian army denies that any of this ever happened.

Pakistani gunners making life miserable for indians

That evening, after the sun went down, the men at Sher all crammed into the largest igloo for what Captain Yasin called “after-dinner discussion.” It began with the sergeant, or havildar, thumping out a beat on an empty jerry can using a carabiner. The men began singing in Pashto, while Yasin—who is a hafiz, which means he has memorized the entire Koran—translated for me. It was a song about the cruelty of beautiful women, he said, about the rigidity of their hearts and the shallowness of their sincerity. Then the men shifted to Urdu, the language of the Mogul poets and Sufi mystics. They sang of how the affection between men and women has the power to transcend social caste. They sang about an aspect of love so complex and subtle that Yasin said it was impossible to translate and advised me to just sit back and enjoy the music.

After the singing stopped, Yasin and I stepped outside. The moon was surrounded by a rainbow-colored ring, harbinger of a storm, and the peaks were cast in a milky glow. From the shadows came a disembodied voice in Urdu.

“Beautiful night, sir.”

“Mehboob, is that you?” said Yasin to a lone sentry who had volunteered to stand watch so that his companions could hobnob with the guests.

Boeing Next-Generation 737 Carbon Brakes Earn FAA Certification

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Hassaan

NOTE: visit www.techenlife.com for more details regarding this blog and military aviation!!

Boeing [NYSE: BA] announced that it earned certification last week from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for its new carbon brakes designed for the Next-Generation 737.

The brakes, supplied by Messier-Bugatti, also entered service last week when Boeing delivered a Next-Generation 737-700 to Delta Air Lines — the first of 10 737-700s the airline will receive over the next several years.

Carbon brakes weigh 700 pounds (320 kg) less than high-capacity steel brakes for Next-Generation 737-700, -800 and -900ER (Extended Range) airplanes; and 550 pounds (250 kg) less than standard-capacity steel brakes for Next-Generation 737-600s and -700s. Reduced weight contributes to reductions in associated fuel burn and CO2 emissions depending on airline operations.

Delta Air Lines is coupling lighter-weight carbon brakes with drag- and emissions-reducing Blended Winglets (wing tip extensions) to improve operating and fuel efficiency simultaneously on its Next-Generation 737s. Delta’s stated goal is to have greater flexibility to serve more markets with existing aircraft, further enhancing the largest international expansion in Delta’s history.

Carbon brakes are the most recent enhancement that Boeing is offering on its Next-Generation 737. Since its entry into service, Boeing has introduced product enhancements that improve performance, navigation precision and passenger comfort on the Next-Generation 737.

Source: http://www.flyingnews.com/Home/tabid/36/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/1458/Default.aspx