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.
Thank you Anil Babu for this story. When such tragedies strike, one usually reads names and they mean nothing. The story of Bobby is well told with sensitivity and care only a person like Anil Babu could tell.
ReplyDeleteTapen
Very nicely written.
ReplyDeleteThe possibilities which blesses every one, the hope that life engenders, needs time to unfold, spread and permeate. Though every un-natural incident caused death puts an to such possibilities-big accidents become more poignant due to the scale of event.
ReplyDeleteI was a student when these aircrafts came and remember that there were string of mishaps largely due to poor skills of IA pilots. If I remember correctly, there was an Airbus Industry official who was quoted to have said to this affect (about IA pilots)-give them a bullock cart and trust these pilots to crash them. The ugly scuffle which broke out (in NACIL) on who gets trained for Dreamliners just a few months back indicates that lessons haven't been learnt thereby putting lives of more Bobbys on line. It pains that the tragedy wasn't an act of God or an engineering force majeure (despite the A-320 being a revolutionary passenger aircraft), it was due to sheer stupid and callous management of our civil aviation babus-they were never brought to justice for such avoidable mishaps (those days Indian civil aviation was in tight fists of patronage spewing people). IA/AI (now NACIL-so eerily similar to pesticide manufacturing company NOCIL-one wishes that they indeed get rid of the pests which thrive on culture of patronage in which IA/AI is soaked-still) has been guilty of running itself on lines of zamindari system since 80s.
Having dabbled with piloting myself and being a passenger for several years I now make these journeys as a gamble or should I say as a matter of destiny. Remember, all the sifarshi pilots with NACIL and private airlines (one was daughter of a senior DGCA employee)?
The story of Bobby, sadly reminds you of Nedelin catastrophe in 1960, where Marshal Nedelin ordered scientists and engineers to work for almost 72 hours without a break while testing a missile which proposed use of extremely corrosive and poisonous fuel for the first time. Nedelin refused to move to bunkers while a leak was attended and stubbornly sat close to the fully fuelled missile with firing circuit connected, when an electrical short accidentally fired the second stage wiping scores of top military and rocketry experts. A bull headed leadership like Nedelin's is evidenced in several areas today where reasoned thought of people who know the subject is subservient to a leadership which is oblivious to the nitty-gritty of the matter they lord over. One notices with dismay, how comparison of incomparables drive policy pronouncements and inform the decisions of top managers. Nedelins in our leadership (in most of the seats of leadership-government, PSUs, private, academics etc) will be the nemesis of any meaningful progress which the country can make- sadly the nation will devour many more Bobbys.
A beautiful requiem, movingly written, Anil.
ReplyDeleteYes, I remember the day and its consequences. Raja Viswanath Prathap Singh. ordered the 18 (?) Airbus 320's of Indian Airlines grounded for more than a year. Not that he disliked fly-by-wire so much, but he hated Rajiv Gandhi ( who ordered the planes) more. As the Director of the Indian lab which had some knowledge of fly-by-wire technology at that time, I got embroiled in the investigations and some aftermath too.
Kudos Anil , it reads like an engrossing short story .I read it in a long pull , drawn by the pathos of Bobby's death. He would have been a many times millonaire had he lived.
ReplyDeleteHave learned more about gold electroplating, fly-by-wire A-320's than about Bobby Randhawa!!
ReplyDeleteVikram, fair enough. A reader can't possibly learn more about a subject than the writer knows. Unless he does independent research.
DeleteA very moving article. A real brilliant entrepreneur lost to the world. The Airbus was introduced during the term of Air Marshal Lal as Chairman of Indian Airlines. I have had the pleasure of travelling with him and I asked him why was their such a criticism of the aircraft. He explained that it was the first plane that we bought which was so completely computerised that irt needed protection against heat and dust in India for which they had to make some protective modifications. But oit was the most economically operated aircraft with a break even point of about 50%. In the case sited by you itis obvious that the pilot was probably not properly trained to operate the "fly by wire" techniques of the aircraft. The loss of Bobby was indded tragic.
ReplyDelete