Boston Globe
September 29, 2003

Plane crash victims leave legacy
Couple killed in Concord were physicians, philanthropists

By Ralph Ranalli, Globe Staff

Dr. Pat Iannolo remembers the day several years ago that his longtime colleague Dr. Ravindra F. Shah came to him full of mixed emotions about what should have been a happy occasion: his appointment as a general in the New York Air National Guard.

''He loved flying,'' said Iannolo, the director of medical affairs for Oswego Hospital in upstate New York, where Shah was a urologist. ''But he told me that when he became a general, they grounded him.''

Iannolo was among friends and colleagues yesterday who described Shah as a man devoted in equal and enthusiastic parts to medicine, aviation, family, philanthropy, and service to his country, as they mourned the deaths of the 64-year-old urologist and his wife, Dr. Manjula Shah, in a plane crash Saturday in Concord.

The couple were flying in a single-engine, four-seat Cessna 182T Skylane from an airport near their home in Oswego to Hanscom Field in Bedford when the aircraft went down in a wooded conservation area a few miles from the landing strip, officials said. Neither friends nor officials could say yesterday why the two were traveling to Massachusetts.

Officials said there was no distress call but that shortly after the Hanscom control tower lost contact with the aircraft at 11:04 a.m., a local resident jogging in the Punkatasset Hill conservation area discovered the wreckage and called police on her cellphone.

Paul Schlamm, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said that investigators would probably examine the wreckage again today, and that determining a cause of the crash could take a while. ''Investigators have pulled the plane's maintenance records, the weather data, and the tapes of any conversations with the tower,'' Schlamm said. ''They also said that there is at least one eyewitness.''

Friends said yesterday that they were stunned by the news of the crash. ''We are really shocked by this,'' said Dr. Yves Lafond, a specialist in geriatric medicine who shared a private medical office space with Ravindra Shah in neighboring Fulton, N.Y. ''He was a wonderful person, very kind, and very dedicated to his friends, his patients, and his family.''

Both Lafond and Iannolo said that the couple seemed to be very close, both socializing and working together even after Manjula Shah, 65, retired from her anesthesiology practice.

''He was quite a gentleman and very much in love with his work and his wife,'' Iannolo said. ''It was actually quite nice to see a physician have such a commitment to his family.''

One of the couple's projects was a charity they called the Tarandi Foundation, which, among other works, endowed scholarships to American medical students of Asian-Indian descent at Brown University in Rhode Island. Both the couple's adult children, Monica and Neelesh, earned degrees at Brown, university spokesman Mark Nickel said.

According to various news sources, the foundation also granted scholarships to high school and undergraduate students and supported health and education projects in rural India.

Ravindra Shah came to the United States from India in 1961, began his military career as a physician with the 174th Tactical Airlift Command Clinic in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1982, and rose to flight surgeon and commander before becoming state air surgeon a decade later, a spokesman for the New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs said.

Spokesman Scott Sandman said Shah was responsible for medical recruiting and promoting flying safety with the New York Air National Guard, and provided medical advice and support to the emergency responders on duty at ground zero after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He became a brigadier general in 1999 and retired within the past year, Sandman said. He had since been teaching medicine and working as a urologist at Oswego Hospital.

Profiled four years ago in Rediff.com, a New York-based online provider of news for natives of India, Ravindra Shah said that he hoped to leave a lasting, meaningful legacy. ''You better leave behind something other than a bank balance and money for your children,'' he was quoted as saying. ''A moral and spiritual legacy certainly has more value than millions of dollars.''

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 9/29/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
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