Celebrating two success stories

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Two separate events involving the Indian subcontinent, a dramatic rescue in Pakistan and a successful Moon landing by India, took the focus away briefly from growing attention on our coming election.

India made history as it landed its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft near the lunar south pole, making it the first country to do so and adding the world’s highest populated nation to an elite club with only three other members, the US, Russia and China.

The landing was in an extremely hostile environment where the surface is very uneven and full of boulders.

It came only a few days after a similar mission by Russia failed when its Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the Moon.

Understandably the achievement was greeted with jubilation in India and is seen as another sign of the country’s growing development and importance.

At the same time India’s neighbour and great rival Pakistan was the scene of a heart-warming rescue on a smaller scale but similar to the rescue of boys trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018.

Army commandos used helicopters and a makeshift chairlift to rescue two men and six boys trapped in a broken cable car dangling hundreds of metres above a canyon in a remote part of northern Pakistan.

One of the boys was rescued by helicopter amid several unsuccessful rescue attempts before that mission was aborted over concerns a  chopper’s downwash might snap the sole chain supporting the cable car.

Every time a helicopter approached, the wind from the rotors would shake and unbalance the cable car making the children scream in fear, Pakistan news agencies reported.

Pakistan’s army said the pilots demonstrated exceptional skill and professionalism in an operation of unprecedented difficulty.

As each of the group was landed via a chairlift later that night there were shouts of God is Great from the large crowd gathered to watch, with family members in tears.

Included in the same news cycle were reports, soon confirmed, that the boss of the Wagner mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin was on a plane which crashed killing all on board.

Prigozhin led a failed mutiny against the leadership of Russia’s army in June that left president Vladimir Putin looking weak. He has been described as a “dead man walking” since then.

A Wagner-linked Telegram channel reported that the private jet was shot down by air defences, blaming “traitors to Russia”.

That story is one that will cause concern but is even more reason to celebrate the two success stories from Asia, where the news is often bad.