Heard of the mitrailleuse machine gun? The world’s first rapid-fire gun developed in the 1860s, it was like Onida TV—owner’s pride and enemy’s envy. The French owners kept it under such thick wraps that when the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 broke out, the guns were issued to frontline troops without operating manuals. By the time clearances were obtained and the manuals arrived, France had lost the war.
Looks like that’s going to be the case with the F-35. The plane, billed at $100 million as a futuristic fifth-gen fighter, is being offered only to the US’s closest pals. Don Trump had condescendingly offered it to us, but has come to think it as a case of casting pearls before a cow.
Now the plane is looking increasingly like the mitrailleuse gun. The Americans had given a few to their British buddies, who have since been flying it around like boys who got new toys. A few of the naval version came to our neighbourhood, and one of the birds ran out of fuel! The pilot found Thiruvananthapuram on his GPS, ensured Shashi Tharoor wasn’t around, and landed there.
That looked like a Viktor Belenko act. Belenko, if you have forgotten, was a Soviet pilot who landed in Japan in 1976 with a MiG-25, the world’s fastest (three times faster than sound), highest-flying and most super secret plane then, pleading no fuel. Once he landed, he wanted to defect to the west. As the Soviets seethed, the Americans landed in hordes, seeking to peek into the mystery plane. They ripped it apart, found its techno-wizardry beyond them, failed to put it together, and shipped it in crates to Russia.
The F-35 pilot, a British gentleman, had no such traitorous intent; God’s own Malayalis, ever hospitable, had no evil spy-fly ideas either. They gave him food, fuel and civil clothing (perhaps offered him an Ayurvedic massage, too), but as he got back into the cockpit after his R&R, he realised the plane wouldn’t start.
Like the frontline French gunners in the Franco-Prussian war, he didn’t know anything about the plane except to fly it—not even how to open the bonnet and check the engine oil, battery water and fan belt, the chores my generation used to do every morning in our Ambys and Fiats. (Today’s drivers may laugh, but this morning drill taught us a lot about how car engines ran, how to check the oil level on the dipstick, how the dynamo was connected to the battery, how the radiator cooled, how to wipe the distributor dry and re-start the car if it got stalled on water-logged roads.)
The pilot radioed for help; his mother ship HMS Prince of Wales sent half a dozen engineers. As in the case of Humpty Dumpty, all the king’s toolings and all the king’s men couldn’t put the fighter in flight again. The yanks had kept everything to themselves.
His Malayali hosts have since been having a roll on the troll. Even the state tourism department made an e-poster showing the plane in a coconut grove and saying, “Kerala is such an amazing place, I don’t want to leave.”
Last heard, a squadron of engineers have landed to fix the plane or take it apart and send it in crates to London, much like how Belenko’s MiG-25 was shipped to Russia.
There’s one twist to the MiG-25 story that I heard in Moscow in 1993—that the KGB had actually worked on Belenko to defect with the plane, so as to dazzle the west with their techno-wizardry.
Sounds far-fetched. But was somebody playing a sales trick to impress us by landing an F-35 next to our southern air command? If yes, it has backfired. Show me one air marshal who would buy a plane that needs special tows to move it into a hangar?
prasannan@theweek.in