Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows.

Ramanathan Iyer, a retired Colonel of the South African Air Force and a Wing Commander in the Indian Air Force till 1996, lived an extraordinary life and passed away at the age of 69 on March 17 doing what he loved best: flying a military aeroplane. I first came across Rama, as he was popularly called in the IAF, in June 1981 as a cadet at the Air Force Academy in Dundigal. Accosting me one morning in the cafeteria, he said, “You seem to be a serious bloke. Do you know your vital actions before take-off — rattle them off  and you can go.”

By then, Rama was already an A2 qualified instructor and much liked among cadets — he was calm, soft-spoken, an excellent teacher and treated his pupils with kindness and dignity — not a very common thing in those days when most instructors followed the maxim of “spare the rod and spoil the child”. He was also smart and handsome and had a swagger with a touch of benign arrogance when dealing with authority and protocol that was so typical of fighter pilots in those days. I lost touch with Rama for a few years and then met him again at the Flying Instructors’ School at Tambaram, where he was a “super instructor” training rookie flying instructors like me.

Rama was the kind of commanding officer all budding fighter pilots would love to have — always leading from the front, an excellent communicator, responsive and open, sociable, and most important, would stand up for his boys whatever the consequence.