Flight of fancy! Britisher helps IAF's vintage planes fly again

In 2012, when the Indian Air Force showed off its first vintage craft in the pale blue skies of Delhi, there was awe and bewilderment at the capital's Hindon Air Base. The occasion was momentous - the IAF was celebrating its 80th anniversary. To mark the grand event, IAF had decided to set off its tiny wooden biplane, the Tiger Moth, amid the flashy Sukhoi Su-30 fighters.

With Tiger's 70-year-old engine overhauled, and its yellow exterior, elaborately restored, it was impossible to gauge how much was old, and what was new. Braving the air, roughly at about 90 kmph - as slow as the fastest car on Mumbai's streets - the Tiger couldn't come close to challenging the circus of planes that were swinging and sliding, higher above. And yet, it was the most jaw dropping of them all.

Now, four years later, while sipping from a mug of latte at a café inside a Bandra bookshop, Oxford-based British pilot Mike Edwards says this is why he's so obsessed with restoring vintage planes.

"It draws curiosity," he says. "And compels you to ask the right questions about its history." Edwards, who is chief adviser to the IAF, doesn't tell us yet that it was he who was helming the vintage aircraft that day, when thousands of spectators looked above. But, in his newly released book Spitfire Singh (Bloomsbury India), which documents the life of Air Vice Marshall Hajinder Singh - the man who first made an effort to save IAF's vintage aircraft from being sold as scrap - Edwards describes the event in vivid detail. "The thought in my mind as I looked over my shoulder at the faceless crowd below was how did this Gora, this white face, this Welshman, end up flying in an IAF parade?" he writes.

That it was an emergency technical flaw that forced the vintage airplane expert to take to the cockpit is a story he'd rather leave for another day. But, ever since, 49-year-old Edwards keeps coming back for the annual air display on October 8, to ensure that the two vintage IAF aircraft - Tiger Moth (1932) and Havard (1942), whose restoration efforts he spearheaded, don't "misbehave" mid-air.

The vintage plane doctor
Edward's affair with planes began when he was eight years old. "My father was a pilot in the Navy, flying aircraft of airport carriers. Later, he went into air display, flying in air shows around the world. And because of that, I would hang around with the engineers," he recalls.

As young Edwards had a small hand, the engineers would often elicit his services "to get into the nooks and crannies of airplanes with spanners to fix the nuts and bolts". "I first started helping engineers work on aircraft from the Rothmans aerobatic team in 1978. I moved on to helping or rather hindering on vintage aircraft four years later," says Edwards, who served in the British Royal Air Force for three years, before flying as a commercial pilot for British Airways (BA).

Though Edwards doesn't have the requisite engineering qualifications to single-handedly restore planes, his passion for vintage aircraft and the insight he gained about their mechanics while working with trained engineers, helped give him an edge as a pilot. A serendipitous encounter with a vintage Spitfire, once flown by the same AVM Singh, whom he would later go on to write about, convinced him that the old aircraft in India needed a plane doctor urgently.

"The Spitfire, introduced in the 40s, was a thoroughbred among fighter planes, and India had many squadrons of them," explains Edwards. They were used till the early 80s, but after a crash in 1986, the IAF plugged its use citing safety concerns. "In 2007, during a visit to the IAF museum in Palam, I chanced upon a hangar in the vicinity, which looked like it hadn't been used for a long time," says Edwards, slightly embarrassed that he broke into the hangar to find the secret it had locked. Here, he saw the lone Spitfire, chipped off its former glory. "These planes couldn't be left to decay, especially because the IAF has such a long history and is one of the longest serving airforces in the world."

A year later, he decided to moot a proposal to the IAF to restore the vintage planes. While the proposal was immediately accepted, it would take three years, before he would get the final nod to restore them. "Indian bureaucracy," he laments.

Mike Edwards. Pic/Atul Kamble

How the restoration works
At present, IAF's vintage planes are restored in the UK, and not India, says Edwards as it has the resources, technicians and technology to ensure that the process is foolproof. "And, there are only a certain set of licensed engineers, who are allowed to carry out the repairs," he says. Edwards says that he helps out with the fixing of planes, but it is always done under the supervision of technicians.

The process, he says, is very similar to the restoration of vintage cars. "In a way, you have to start work backwards," he explains. "We have to take off every piece and part of the plane, down to the tubes and nuts and bolts. These parts then go through what we call a nondestructive testing (NDT) to check if there are any cracks or damage. Only if they are good enough, are they cleaned up and re-painted, so that they last longer. If some parts cannot be used, we use the old pattern to make a new one," adds Edwards.

The Tiger Moth, for instance, is made of part wood and metal. "We had to hire a carpenter to work on the plane," he says. "So, the process was 80 per cent engineering and 20 per cent artistic," he explains. The planes are later shipped off or flown back to India. Edwards has already given hands-on training to six Indian pilots to use these antiquated planes, as they require "special skill and expertise". He is now supervising the repairs of a DC3 Dakota, which was incidentally used by the IAF during the World War II, when it functioned as the auxiliary arm of the RAF.

"An Indian businessman has bought the vehicle from the RAF and is gifting the vintage air carrier to the IAF," says Edwards, who between his hectic work schedule as pilot for BA, visits India three to four times a month to ensure that work on refurbishing old flights continues. And, he doesn't take a rupee for his services. "I think I am doing it because I quite like the sight of old planes in the sky," he says. Next on his radar is Hajinder Singh's 1942 Spitfire. "It's going to be a challenge," he says, "But anything can be made to fly again. It is only a matter of time, originality and vision."