The power hang glider, carrying Squadron Leader Ramakant and Junior Warrant Officer S.K. Yadav, lands at the Bagdogra air force base on Saturday. A Telegraph picture

Bagdogra, Feb. 24: Knuckles tightly gripping the control panels and making sure that not an ounce of their body weight is displaced in the wrong direction, Squadron Leader Ramakant and Junior Warrant Officer S.K. Yadav manoeuvred the 400-kg power hang glider through clouds and hills between Hashimara and Guwahati.

“That 250-km flight on the second day of the Eastern Air Command Power Hang Glider Expedition was the toughest part of our 15-day travails and took an excruciating three hours to cover,” Ramakant said yesterday after landing at Bagdogra air base, from where they had taken off on February 8.

“The last leg from Hashimara back to the base was also tricky as temperature above land had gone up, resulting in hot air rising and turbulences at our cruising level,” said Ramakant. He added that the lightweight glider with just delta wings and no rudder or tailfins is a “very unstable aircraft to handle”.

But these hurdles did not stop the duo from completing the 1,700-km ride, covering 10 air force bases in north Bengal and the Northeast.

They created a record in Shillong by taking off the glider — with the maximum amount of weight it can carry — from a large helipad and flying it at a height of 6,000ft above sea level when temperature was minus three degrees Celsius before returning to the base.

“We will be applying to the Limca Book of Records for achieving this at a height of 6,000ft above sea level. No power hang glider in India has done this before,” Ramakant said.

He already holds two records in the Limca book, both set in 2006 when he and Yadav flew from Delhi to Jammu and then to Dibrugarh covering 3,700km as part of the IAF platinum jubilee celebrations.

The second record was flying solo without oxygen from Jammu to Udhampur at a height of 12,000ft.

The glider, which has a maximum fuel capacity for a three-hour flight, first went to Hashimara, then to Guwahati, Shillong, Dimapur, Jorhat, Dibrugarh, Dinjan (on Arunachal-China border), Chabua, Tezpur and back again through Guwahati.