His name was Bobby Randhawa and he was on his way to see me. He had landed that morning in Bombay from Boulder, Colorado. Too late to catch the flight he was booked on, he spoke to me briefly before taking IC605. It crashed that afternoon in February 1990 short of the runway at the Bangalore airport and came to a halt within the Karnataka Golf Course.
Key cause: pilots not fully conversant with the fly-by-wire technology of the recently commissioned Airbus A-320.
Fellow ISI alumnus Srinivas Bhogle, who was then with National Aerospace Laboratories, recently wrote about the crash in detail here and triggered this memorandum on the events set off by Bobby's death. There are 89 other stories out there.
Around the time of the crash, I was going through the background papers and wondering how to deal with Bobby.
At about 1:30 p.m. the secretary buzzed to say that the flight had been delayed. Two more such calls happened over the next one hour. No official announcements, but rumours of a plane crash had started floating around town and phones had started ringing.
Background
Bobby was the Technical Director of Vac-Tec, a company working at the cutting edge of thin film technology. I had met him a few weeks earlier when a colleague and I visited Vac-Tec in a four nation sweep to select a 'physical vapour deposition' (PVD) based decorative coating plant for watch cases.
Using this technology expensive gold electroplating is replaced by a coat of gold-lookalike titanium nitrate, a very hard substance. A sparse dusting of actual gold on top creates the illusion of real gold colour much coveted by the human race. PVD thus offers enormous gold savings and phenomenally increased durability.
The alchemy happens in a vacuum chamber where an Argon plasma is created, and in a process reminiscent of sci-fi movies, gold is literally vapourised off a solid gold bar, dances across to the desired object and condenses there in a magically fine and uniform layer.
Worldwide, only four or five equipment manufacturers were then able to achieve the desired results consistently. We adopted an accelerated learning-evaluation-selection cycle by visiting all of them in quick succession. Vac-Tec was our last stop. After a courtesy meetings with top management, Bobby took over for the next two days for a thorough presentation of what they had to offer.
Bobby was from a small village in the Punjab. The only one from his village to have gone to college in a nearby town. He did well and landed in the U.S. on a scholarship for graduate studies. A well built, presentable, cusp-of-thirty young man, he was one of the few Indians then in Boulder.
And one of the half a dozen acknowledged technology leaders in his field worldwide - he could make gold dance exactly the way it needed to.
By the time we were done in Boulder, though highly impressed by their product and technology, we were convinced that Vac-Tec were not really equipped to provide support and service to a novice customer in far away Bangalore, and we decided to go for one of their competitors.
Back to the crash
Vac-Tec, who had been following up vigorously for the mega-bucks order, were not willing to give up. In spite of our telling them that it was of no use, Bobby embarked on a journey, punctuated by the delayed London-Bombay leg, the missed domestic connection and the not-missed alternate flight that crashed that afternoon.
Around 5 p.m. I was told that the injured, as also the 90 or so who had perished, were being shifted to the Air-force Hospital.
I hauled myself over there. Bobby was not among those injured. Nor among the recognisable bodies, covered in white sheets and lined up on the lawn.
Aftermath
Turned out Bobby had no Indian friends in Boulder. And his family had no phone at home or anyone in the family who spoke english. Our associate Timex, also a Vac-Tec customer, with offices in the U.S. and in Delhi, helped co-ordinate the disposal of his assets and entitlements.
A few months later the phone buzzed and a bewildered secretary announced the unexpected arrival of a Mr.& Mrs. Randhawa. That would be Bobby's brother and sister-in-law. They had come straight from the train station by the simple device of telling the auto driver: Titan office ko le chalo.
They needed some sort of closure by visiting the place where Bobby's life had come to an end. And by talking to the one person they could reach who had last spoken to Bobby. Over the years he had visited them occasionally but they had never gone over and had no idea what he did. They had been surprised to receive a veritable fortune as the proceeds of his estate.
There was not much we could say to each other. They ended up crying inconsolably for what must have been about half an hour but seemed much longer. Later that day we arranged for them to be taken to the very spot where the plane had crashed.
Aftermath
About a couple of years later, Paul, who had been Bobby's deputy in Vac-Tec called out of the blue. The company was liquidating stocks. Would we be interested in buying a coating plant at fire-sale prices?
Our technical people were by now conversant with the technology and felt that if we were getting a great deal we should look at it. I was headed westward on other business anyway, so I landed once again in beautiful Boulder. I was received by the company's Corporate Secretary and taken to the factory.
The empty parking lot had not prepared me for the shock awaiting me in the lobby. What had been a tastefully decorated space abuzz with activity was now bare. Where there used to be an attractive secretary at a glass and steel counter now stood, leaning against the wall and smiling, Bobby Randhawa. It took a couple of moments to register that it was just a life-size, and life-like, portrait.
In the cavernous, dark shop floor stood a number of tall cylindrical systems of different sizes in various stages of completion - looking like a George Lucas movie set. There around a work platform I met Paul and the remaining skeletal technical team.
Over the next couple of hours as Paul tried to sell me a plant, the story of how Bobby's departure had killed a vibrant business unfolded. As he spoke about what they could offer us, Bobby turned up every few minutes in some context, and Paul had to stop to wipe away silent tears. He had lost a boss he admired and a friend he loved; the company an asset it had not been able to replace.
They had tried various people from the academic space but no one could comfortably manage the move from lab scale to production scale. Regular customers, who were used to calling up Bobby directly for help in dealing with problems, or designing jigs and fixtures, or developing new coatings, had peeled off and new ones were hard to come by. Product development had come to a halt. Vac-Tec had gone into liquidation under Chapter 7.
Epilogue
This technology till today remains in a few hands. Out of the ashes of Vac-Tec was later born a new company Vapour-Tec, in Boulder. They do not offer gold coating in their regular line-up.
Key cause: pilots not fully conversant with the fly-by-wire technology of the recently commissioned Airbus A-320.
Fellow ISI alumnus Srinivas Bhogle, who was then with National Aerospace Laboratories, recently wrote about the crash in detail here and triggered this memorandum on the events set off by Bobby's death. There are 89 other stories out there.
Around the time of the crash, I was going through the background papers and wondering how to deal with Bobby.
At about 1:30 p.m. the secretary buzzed to say that the flight had been delayed. Two more such calls happened over the next one hour. No official announcements, but rumours of a plane crash had started floating around town and phones had started ringing.
Background
Bobby was the Technical Director of Vac-Tec, a company working at the cutting edge of thin film technology. I had met him a few weeks earlier when a colleague and I visited Vac-Tec in a four nation sweep to select a 'physical vapour deposition' (PVD) based decorative coating plant for watch cases.
Using this technology expensive gold electroplating is replaced by a coat of gold-lookalike titanium nitrate, a very hard substance. A sparse dusting of actual gold on top creates the illusion of real gold colour much coveted by the human race. PVD thus offers enormous gold savings and phenomenally increased durability.
The alchemy happens in a vacuum chamber where an Argon plasma is created, and in a process reminiscent of sci-fi movies, gold is literally vapourised off a solid gold bar, dances across to the desired object and condenses there in a magically fine and uniform layer.
Worldwide, only four or five equipment manufacturers were then able to achieve the desired results consistently. We adopted an accelerated learning-evaluation-selection cycle by visiting all of them in quick succession. Vac-Tec was our last stop. After a courtesy meetings with top management, Bobby took over for the next two days for a thorough presentation of what they had to offer.
Bobby was from a small village in the Punjab. The only one from his village to have gone to college in a nearby town. He did well and landed in the U.S. on a scholarship for graduate studies. A well built, presentable, cusp-of-thirty young man, he was one of the few Indians then in Boulder.
And one of the half a dozen acknowledged technology leaders in his field worldwide - he could make gold dance exactly the way it needed to.
By the time we were done in Boulder, though highly impressed by their product and technology, we were convinced that Vac-Tec were not really equipped to provide support and service to a novice customer in far away Bangalore, and we decided to go for one of their competitors.
Back to the crash
Vac-Tec, who had been following up vigorously for the mega-bucks order, were not willing to give up. In spite of our telling them that it was of no use, Bobby embarked on a journey, punctuated by the delayed London-Bombay leg, the missed domestic connection and the not-missed alternate flight that crashed that afternoon.
Around 5 p.m. I was told that the injured, as also the 90 or so who had perished, were being shifted to the Air-force Hospital.
I hauled myself over there. Bobby was not among those injured. Nor among the recognisable bodies, covered in white sheets and lined up on the lawn.
Aftermath
Turned out Bobby had no Indian friends in Boulder. And his family had no phone at home or anyone in the family who spoke english. Our associate Timex, also a Vac-Tec customer, with offices in the U.S. and in Delhi, helped co-ordinate the disposal of his assets and entitlements.
A few months later the phone buzzed and a bewildered secretary announced the unexpected arrival of a Mr.& Mrs. Randhawa. That would be Bobby's brother and sister-in-law. They had come straight from the train station by the simple device of telling the auto driver: Titan office ko le chalo.
They needed some sort of closure by visiting the place where Bobby's life had come to an end. And by talking to the one person they could reach who had last spoken to Bobby. Over the years he had visited them occasionally but they had never gone over and had no idea what he did. They had been surprised to receive a veritable fortune as the proceeds of his estate.
There was not much we could say to each other. They ended up crying inconsolably for what must have been about half an hour but seemed much longer. Later that day we arranged for them to be taken to the very spot where the plane had crashed.
Aftermath
About a couple of years later, Paul, who had been Bobby's deputy in Vac-Tec called out of the blue. The company was liquidating stocks. Would we be interested in buying a coating plant at fire-sale prices?
Our technical people were by now conversant with the technology and felt that if we were getting a great deal we should look at it. I was headed westward on other business anyway, so I landed once again in beautiful Boulder. I was received by the company's Corporate Secretary and taken to the factory.
The empty parking lot had not prepared me for the shock awaiting me in the lobby. What had been a tastefully decorated space abuzz with activity was now bare. Where there used to be an attractive secretary at a glass and steel counter now stood, leaning against the wall and smiling, Bobby Randhawa. It took a couple of moments to register that it was just a life-size, and life-like, portrait.
In the cavernous, dark shop floor stood a number of tall cylindrical systems of different sizes in various stages of completion - looking like a George Lucas movie set. There around a work platform I met Paul and the remaining skeletal technical team.
Over the next couple of hours as Paul tried to sell me a plant, the story of how Bobby's departure had killed a vibrant business unfolded. As he spoke about what they could offer us, Bobby turned up every few minutes in some context, and Paul had to stop to wipe away silent tears. He had lost a boss he admired and a friend he loved; the company an asset it had not been able to replace.
They had tried various people from the academic space but no one could comfortably manage the move from lab scale to production scale. Regular customers, who were used to calling up Bobby directly for help in dealing with problems, or designing jigs and fixtures, or developing new coatings, had peeled off and new ones were hard to come by. Product development had come to a halt. Vac-Tec had gone into liquidation under Chapter 7.
Epilogue
This technology till today remains in a few hands. Out of the ashes of Vac-Tec was later born a new company Vapour-Tec, in Boulder. They do not offer gold coating in their regular line-up.
