From the skies over Kalaikunda in ’65 to a Christmas table in Australia decades later — remembering Flight Lieutenant Alfred Tyrone Cooke, VrC. A true Bull who flew with nerve, humour, and heart. Rest easy, Sir.

Back in 1965, freshly minted out of IIT Kharagpur and still smelling faintly of lecture halls and late-night chai, I rocked up at Indian Oil’s Gauhati Refinery as a shiny new Engineer Trainee. Full of diagrams, differential equations and the quiet confidence of someone who had never yet met a real crisis. Naturally the universe decided that was the perfect moment to start a war right across the border in what was then East Pakistan.

My carefully prepared job description lasted about five minutes. One day I was poring over process flow sheets; the next I was a civil-defence volunteer, scrambling around with sandbags and wondering whether the emergency siren meant “take cover” or “lunch is ready.”

It properly kicked off on 6 August. We looked up and there they were — Pakistan Air Force fighters swooping low over the refinery like they owned the place. Luckily the army had thoughtfully parked a couple of anti-aircraft guns on the nearby hillocks. Those guns barked once, barked twice, and the uninvited guests remembered they had urgent business elsewhere. We all pretended we hadn’t been holding our breath.

By September the whole thing had turned into a full-scale drama. My junior friend Raghunathan, still stuck at IIT Kharagpur, later swore that he and the hostel boys had front-row seats to actual dogfights. Indian and Pakistani jets were buzzing past so low they were practically at eye-level with the third-floor balcony. Engineering lectures never stood a chance against that sort of entertainment.

Fast-forward a few decades and the circle closed in the most unexpected place: a Christmas lunch at Keith and Maureen Mitchell’s house in Australia. About ten years ago now. Keith, bless him, had rounded up a few Anglo-Indian expats for the usual festive feast. Among them sat a quiet, unassuming chap introduced simply as Alfred Cook. Only later did the full name drop: Flight Lieutenant Alfred Tyrone Cooke, VrC — the same man who had been dancing with Sabres over Kalaikunda while Raghunathan and the IIT boys were watching from the rooftops.

There we were — me (Roy), Keith (ex-RAF, so of course he had opinions about everything with wings), my son Anish, and Alfred himself — around the table while the turkey cooled and the crackers waited. Alfred started talking about 7 September 1965 as if it had happened last Tuesday. No. 14 Squadron, “The Bulls.” Hawker Hunter. Combat air patrol. Then suddenly four (or was it six?) PAF F-86 Sabres were all over Kalaikunda airfield and the sky turned into a low-level free-for-all that the IIT students later described like a cricket match they could actually see.

Anish, wide-eyed, leaned forward: “Uncle, you were only twenty-six. What on earth was going through your head?”

Alfred gave that half-smile of his. “Honestly? Mostly ‘Don’t let the wingtip hit the trees.’ We were so low I could practically read the name painted on the other chap’s helmet. Sabres turn tighter, Hunters go faster — so you use what you’ve got. One moment you’re chasing, the next someone’s on your tail, and your own anti-aircraft guns are cheerfully shooting at everyone including you. You don’t really think about being twenty-six and full of energy for the nation. You just fly the aeroplane and try not to become a permanent part of the landscape.”

Keith, never one to miss a technical opening, jumped in: “Those 30-mil Aden guns — rate of fire, ammunition load, how long before you were dry?”

Alfred chuckled. “Long enough to put one Sabre into the ground — Flying Officer Afzal Khan, I later learned — and mess up another so badly that Flight Lieutenant Tariq Habeeb just about staggered back to Tezgaon and wrote the thing off. Then the third one… well, the gun stopped answering. So I stayed on his tail anyway, waving the empty aeroplane at him until he decided East Pakistan looked safer. Ten minutes that felt like a lifetime. And I’d started the day on an empty stomach because the breakfast van had come and gone without leaving me so much as a biscuit.”

We all laughed, even though none of it was funny at the time. Anish kept asking about the adrenaline, the fear, the sheer cheek of it. Keith kept asking about energy management and deflection shooting. I just sat there thinking: this is the same sky Raghunathan watched from a hostel roof, and the same man is now politely refusing a second helping of pudding while describing how he once ran out of bullets and kept fighting with pure attitude.

Alfred later gifted that Vir Chakra back to his squadron in 2015. “It belongs to the Bulls,” he said. Classic him.

So it was with a genuinely heavy heart that I heard from Keith the other day: Flight Lieutenant Alfred Tyrone Cooke passed away on 18 September 2026 at Base Hospital, New Delhi, aged 87. The Indian Air Force paid its respects the same day. One of their finest.

From watching those first jets buzz over Gauhati as a wide-eyed trainee, to sitting at Keith and Maureen’s table ten years ago listening to the man who owned those very skies describe the dogfight while we passed the cranberry sauce — life does have a way of delivering history right to your doorstep, usually with a side of Christmas pudding.

Rest easy, Flt Lt Cooke. You flew the aeroplane. And you made the rest of us look up.