Captain Easaw Samuel, 59, rescued 150 workers from a blaze at the oil rig in 2005.Navy divers and the Coast Guard on Thursday searched for the two missing pilots of a Pawan Hans helicopter that crashed into the sea off Mumbai on Wednesday evening, as colleagues and friends expressed shock and disbelief over the incident.They described Captain Easaw Samuel, 59, and Captain TK Guha, 58, as brilliant pilots with thousands of hours of flying experience — and an undying enthusiasm to discuss everything related to aviation. Captain Samuel is particularly famous in the pilots’ community for the daring rescue of 150 ONGC employees from a blaze at the Bombay High offshore oilfield in 1995.On Wednesday, Samuel and Guha were the only people aboard the Dauphin N3 chopper, which plunged into the sea just a few minutes after taking off from a platform near Bombay High.ONGC vessel MV Samudra Sevak’s sonar picked up signals from the crashed helicopter’s emergency locater-transmitter around 2.8 nautical miles (5.18 km) southwest of the suspected crash site on Thursday. But search and rescue teams were unable to locate the missing pilots till late in the evening. Some experts said that the pilots were unlikely to be found alive.As reports of Samuel and Guha’s bleak chances reached the pilots’ community, an eerie silence descended on Pawan Hans Juhu Housing Complex, where the two men lived.Samuel learned flying at Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi in Raebareli, and he had over 20,000 hours of experience of flying a rotary wing aircraft. Civil aviation regulator DGCA had certified him as a check-pilot.Pawan Hans complex residents, many of them pilots, recounted the many walks Samuel took around colony while holding his wife Anita Susan Easaw’s hand. The couple have two daughters, Sneha and Soumya.Samuel would have celebrated his 60th birthday on November 30, a day before his retirement. Friends said that he had been looking forward to return to his native place in Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district, where he has constructed a traditionally styled house.Last week, he was felicitated by the pilots’ guild for his exemplary service to the company. Apart from the Bombay High rescue, he was also known for flying Sonia and Rahul Gandhi during their election campaigns. “Samuel was a very experienced pilot. He piloted multiple flights to Bombay High during emergencies without showing any sign of fatigue. In 1995, he rescued around 150 stranded workers,” a friend said. “He was a gem of a person who always helped people.”Samuel and Guha were part of a programme testing possibility of night flights at oil rigs.Guha had more than 6,000 hours of flying experience and previously served as an army helicopter pilot. He joined Pawan Hans in 2011. His wife Ruma and their daughter Trishna were in Agartala, Tripura, when the crash occurred on Wednesday.Shortly after officials learned about the crash, Sanjay Kumar, Pawan Hans general manager (western region), and his team set up a control room at the company’s VIP guesthouse to assist the rescue operations. “When I received a message of an emergency, little did I know that this tragedy would strike us. We are monitoring the search and rescue operation round the clock,” he said.An angry pilots’ guild at state-run Pawan Hans on Thursday submitted a memorandum to its chairman, BP Sharma, demanding measures to prevent “costly accidents”.Pawan Hans Pilots’ Guild (PHPG) said that Wednesday’s crash in the Arabian Sea and the one in Arunachal in August this year were a wake-up call for the company to reorganise its operations and improve pilot safety.Three people were killed in the Arunachal crash. In 2011, the then Arunachal chief minister was killed when a Pawan Hans chopper crashed. In another tragedy in Tawang that year, 16 people died.“They (the incidents) are a grim pointer to the overall rot in the management of the company and the state of affairs in the operations department in particular,” the guild has said.The pilots said that they had raised safety issues with the management several times, but in vain. “The management has paid no heed to our efforts to highlight various shortcomings and deficiencies, and has treated our efforts with disdain,” they have said in the memorandum.The pilots said that Pawan Hans had failed to incorporate crucial safety and operations advice given by experts.“It is therefore high time to introspect and take corrective measures to stem the rot, to make sure that no more accidents or incidents of this nature take place,” the guild has said.“An unhappy and disgruntled pilot is a potential safety hazard. It is the job of the management to ensure that the pilots are free from any stresses and pressures of human resources and administrative issues for them to perform optimally in the cockpit.”