38-year-old Captain Rajesh Shivrain would have attended the school function of his young daughter today had he not been co-piloting the ill-fated BSF aircraft that crashed after a short take-off here.
Shivrain, a fitness and sports enthusiast, was the only officer of the border guarding force Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) working in the Border Security Force air wing and was reputed for having some deft hands at the flying machines, including on the Superking B-200 that he and his pilot colleague Deputy Commandant Bhagwati Prasad Bhatt was commandeering.
The young officer's two little kids Pradyumn and Pari were in school when their father was flying the BSF sortie to Ranchi carrying a team of six technicians and two others.
"He was supposed to come back and go for his 5-year-old daughter's school function in the evening. It is really tragic and the twist of fate that he met with the air accident," a senior official said.
They said as soon as the news of the air crash came in, the SSB rushed some of its men to fetch the children from school and look after the family.
"He went down in the Dwarka area, kilometres away from where he lived," the official said, adding that Shivrain lived in Sector-4 of Dwarka locality of the national capital.
SSB Director General B D Sharma described Shivrain as a "good officer, brave, sensitive and physically very fit."
"It's a sad day for us to have lost a very good officer," Sharma said.
Shivrain, who joined SSB in 2002 as an officer, was flying the plane with his batch-mate Bhatt, and, coincidentally both were born in 1977.
A resident of Bhiwani, Shivrain joined the BSF air wing in the pilot rank in 2009 and was soon to be inducted permanently in this special unit of the Union Home Ministry.
Senior officials of central police forces will pay their last respects to their fallen colleagues at the Safdarjung airport tomorrow after which the mortal remains of Shivrain will be brought to the SSB headquarters here and subsequently a ceremonial guard will take his body in a truck to his village in Haryana.
