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3 The statue of Flying Officer Nirmaljit Singh Sekhon at the Mini Secretariat in Ludhiana. Tribune photo: Inderjeet Verma
Air Vice Marshal Arjun Subramaniam (Retd)
Sprinting out of an underground shelter as the tannoy (a term used to denote a public address system in older colloquial British English) blares is bread and butter stuff for fighter pilots in the Indian Air Force as they respond to a scramble order to intercept intruding enemy aircraft. Not many, however, would have imagined in the wildest of their dreams that they would have to scramble their jets during an enemy bombing raid that involved four aircraft already in the process of dropping their bombs over targets on the airfield. This is exactly the situation that young Flying Officer Nirmaljit Singh Sekhon found himself in on December 14, 1971, at Srinagar airfield as part of an air defence detachment of four Gnat fighters from 18 Squadron, also called the Flying Bullets.