New Delhi/Lucknow, Sept. 20 -- At about 10.30am on September 7, 1965, Flight Lieutenant Alfred Tyrone Cooke was at 20,000 feet over Bengal, on his third sortie of the day, when the controller asked whether he had the fuel to get back to Kalaikunda. His own airfield was under attack. Flt Lt Cooke had just enough fuel. He turned his Hunter round and went back to fight for his own airfield, and what he did over Kalaikunda in the next few minutes won him the Vir Chakra and is remembered by the Indian Air Force as a masterclass in aggressive air combat. Flt Lt Cooke died on Friday at the Base Hospital in New Delhi at the age of 87. He had flown in from Australia, where he had lived since 1969, for an event his old squadron was holding at Ambala the next day. He had been in the terminal stages of prostate cancer. His brother, Dr Bryan Cooke, flew in from the US to be with him, said Adrian Michael, bursar of La Martiniere College, Lucknow, where both brothers studied and where Bryan Cooke went on to teach. The citation for the Vir Chakra, India's third-highest wartime gallantry award, records that Kalaikunda was under attack by six Sabres, that Flt Lt Cooke led the interception through his own side's anti-aircraft fire, and that he "shot down one of the enemy aircraft which disintegrated in midair". It records that he then put himself behind a second Sabre with no ammunition left, kept it on the run, and that the remaining aircraft fled in confusion. In an account he gave to HT in 2015, the Flt Lt was less formal. He and his wingman, Flying Officer SC Mamgain, split the pair, Mamgain taking one group of Sabres and Cooke the rest. Mamgain was awarded the Vir Chakra for the same action. He spoke to HT on September 9, 2015, fifty years after the battle, when he came to Ambala and gave his Vir Chakra to No. 14 Squadron to keep. The first fight ran low and close, about ten minutes of it. "He was good, I was worried," Flt Lt Cooke said in his recounting of the dogfight. Then came a moment: "I was focusing on it. Then his aircraft exploded and I flew through the fireball." He had been close enough to see the pilot's helmet. "His name was Afzal," Cooke said. The pilot was Flight Lieutenant Afzal Khan of the Pakistan Air Force, and he was killed. In their history of the 1965 air war, PVS Jagan Mohan and Samir Chopra record that his Sabre came down on a hut near the IIT Kharagpur campus, killing two people on the ground. Flt Lt Cooke engaged two more Sabres, firing until his guns were empty, then chased a fourth with nothing left to fire, taking anti-aircraft fire from his own side as he did. He told HT in 2015 that he had kept hoping a round was left. Jagan Mohan and Chopra record that his gun camera film, examined that evening, showed he had fired on four different Sabres and hit three, and that whether a second Sabre was lost has been disputed between Indian and Pakistani accounts ever since. He reached Dum Dum with a damaged wingtip and almost no fuel, and the engine cut before he could park. There was no ladder, he said in the 2015 interaction, so they told him to jump. A member of the ground crew caught him. "He got hold of me and I didn't hit the ground." Flt Lt Cooke came from a middle-class Anglo-Indian family. At La Martiniere, Lucknow, he was a resident scholar of Lyons House from 1950 to 1958. In 2015, 50 years after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, the college honoured Flt Lt Cooke and other former students who fought to protect the borders of the country. Flt Lt Cooke was commissioned into the Indian Air Force on December 19, 1961 and flew Hawker Hunters with No. 14 Squadron at Kalaikunda. He left in December 1968, after seven years in uniform. The Indian Air Force said Flt Lt Cooke's "legendary dogfight over Kalaikunda remains a masterclass in aggressive air combat and unwavering resolve", and that he was awarded the Vir Chakra for his conspicuous gallantry, tactical brilliance and disregard to personal safety....