That's what his widow thinks as she tries to salvage his reputation and convince herself -- and the rest of the world that her husband, Air Commodore (rtd) HS Manget, who was killed while flying a Westland chopper in Jammu in July 1988, was not to blame. The Government had given him ``a flying coffin.''

For, Manget was a man with a formidable record: 5,000 error-free flying hours as a fighter pilot, seven years as a flying instructor, the Mahavir Chakra for flying a bullet-riddled Sukhoi-7 -- its fuel tank and fuselage in a mess -- back to the Amritsar base during the 1971 war.

However, in July 1988 Manget with Wing Commander T S Gouri, a test pilot, was flying a Westland helicopter, on its maiden route, ferrying Vaishnodevi pilgrims from Katra to Sanjhi Chhat nearJammu. The chopper crashed, Mangat and Gouri were killed with five passengers.

The accident was attributed to Manget's bad judgement of bad weather. In fact, media reports that time said it was Manget's fault. The DGCA conducted an inquiry but its report was never made public as it was a classified document.

The bad weather theory is contested by an eyewitness, Sanghamitra Gupta, who lost her husband and daughter in the crash. She saw the chopper go up in flames and she wrote to Gurjit Manget saying there was nothing wrong with the weather as was being made out. So how could a skilled fighter pilot, make such a mistake? With this question, his wife, Gurjit, has been knocking door after door. ``I approached every agency involved in the operation of the Westland flight,'' she says, ``but no one was willing to talk to me, set the record straight.'' So all these years, ``I have complained in my silent conversations with him about his carelessness. Why couldn't you be more careful, didn't you think of me andour children?''

Added to this was the ``attitude'' of Pawan Hans Limited, which ran the chopper service in Jammu. ``They summoned me to their New Delhi headquarters through a registered letter. When I went there, a peon gave me a form to sign and a Rs 3 lakh cheque, my husband's company insurance cover. No senior officer gave me an audience, no one took my phone calls.''

And then one day she heard that the Westland deal -- signed by the late Rajiv Gandhi and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher -- was a monumental blunder, that the 21 choppers did not have even the certificate of airworthiness. The United Front Government decided to junk the entire fleet of 19 -- two crashed -- to British Aerospace for a mere Rs 5 crore.

``It meant that my husband had not died accidentally,'' she says, ``He had been killed. All these years, we had been made to believe that these helicopters were good and that my husband died because he made a bad judgment about the weather.''

When contacted by The IndianExpress, Wing Commander (retd.) KK Saini, who was the Pawan Hans Managing Director in 1988, said a pilot error did indeed cause the crash.

``How could we discuss the cause of the crash with her when the DGCA never gave us the inquiry committee's report, at least not until I was heading the corporation? Also, though I did not personally interact with her, I'm not prepared to believe that a peon gave her the cheque.''

But Gurjit isn't convinced. Her son, who is serving in the Army as a Colonel, has told her to pull herself out of her depression, not to waste any more time.

There's a hint of bitterness in her voice when she recalls how the then Civil Aviation Minister Shivraj Patil recommended her name to the Petroleum Ministry for the allotment of a petrol pump which never came through. ``Is this how a country treats its war heroes and their families?,'' she asks.

All that keeps her going today is the prized Sukhoi-7 which is now an exhibit at the IAF's Palam Museum in the Capital. This was theaircraft in which her husband made aviation history. She looks at visitors looking at the aircraft and she knows she's not alone.