NEW DELHI – The sky had turned black.
Rain smeared the windows.
Air India Express Flight 1344 was midair, roaring through a thunderstorm to the city of Kozhikode’s runway, which had a sudden drop-off at the end and was known to be potentially dangerous.
The pilot, a decorated military floor, ran through the airport once, then twice. With visibility so poor, he sent out the control tower to switch lanes.
On his second attempt to land on Friday night, he apparently hit Runway 10 too late – more than half a mile in the 1.6-mile strip – and with the wind at his back, which was exactly the scenario that Indian aviation experts had warned against.
“All flights that land on Runway 10 in extreme conditions in rain cleanse the lives of all on board,” said a report submitted to India’s civilian authorities in 2011.
The plane, a Boeing 737 returning to South India from Dubai, slipped right off the rain-slicked runway, tumbled down a hill and split in half. Indian officials say 18 people, including both pilots, were killed and more than 150 injured.
Looking at images of the wreckage taken Saturday – with the skin of the plane burned off and large chunks of the cabin scattered across the mud – it is noteworthy that more passengers were not killed.
The plane carried 190 people. Rescue crews, including many villagers, rushed to the scene of the accident within minutes and rescued people. The plane never shone fire; the continuous rain may have any spark vapors.
Survivors said they knew something was wrong the moment the wheels hit the ground.
“The plane landed at such a high speed and then braked really hard,” said Latheesh Muttooly, who was sitting by a window. “There’s usually a joke when you land, but this was much harder and then the plane started going harder.”
The overhead bins burst open. Heavy pieces of luggage fell on people’s heads.
“The next thing I heard was a loud crashing sound, the loudest sound I’ve ever heard,” Mr Muttooly said.
His face clapped in the back in front of his face, in Row 15, and split his chin open. He was dizenich.
‘When I opened my eyes and looked around,’ he said, ‘there was only one row in front of me.’
The front of the plane was burnt down.
With the crash investigation just begun, Indian aviation officials have already begun to pin the blame on the pilot, not on the runway.
“The basic problem, as we understand it in this incident, is that at an orbit of 8,500 feet, the plane landed after crossing one third of the strip, above 3,000 feet,” said Arun Kumar, CEO of India for civil aviation, in an interview.
“What normally happens under such conditions is that the pilot does a go-round and either tries to land again or not land at all, given the weather conditions. Touchdown must occur within the first 500 feet of the strip. ”
“The rules of aviation are too well established,” Mr Kumar added. “Either the pilot goes round or they don’t have to land at all.”
The crash was very similar to another, much more deadly Indian air crash in a runway on a table in 2010, which had seen a closer look at similar runways on a hilltop. India has about four to five of them, officials said.
During the crash in 2010, the same type of aircraft went in, a Boeing 737 belonging to the same airline, Air India Express, and a similar runway with steep cliffs on each side. In that case, the plane crashed from a hill in Mangalore, fell into a valley and burst into flames. More than 150 people were killed.
Thereupon, the Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation formed an advisory council for safety that included aviation experts such as Captain Mohan Ranganathan, a pilot who wrote the 2011 report warning that Kozhikode’s Runway 10 was dangerous. Some of his recommendations, such as adding a safety zone at the end of the runway, were considered, at least in part.
But on Saturday, Captain Ranganathan said in an interview that he was ashamed to learn that the pilot was trying to land in the harshest conditions he warned about.
“Landing in rain with a gust of wind is the most dangerous way you can think of landing,” he said, especially on Kozhikode’s Runway 10.
For a plane to crash, a lump of things would normally go wrong, which seems to be the case in Flight 1344.
The runway was clearly a concern.
The captain, Deepak Sathe, a former pilot pilot of the Indian Air Force, seems to have misjudged the distance he needed to stop the plane.
And the weather was terrible.
This is monsoon season, the time of year for rain, and Captain Sathe tried to bring a plane down in the middle of a flowing rainwater. Over the past several days, Kerala State, where Kozhikode is, and which has a long history of ties to the Persian Gulf, has recovered.
The Meteorological Department of India on Friday issued a red warning for several areas, including Kozhikode. Earlier that day, more than 20 people were killed in a landslide in another part of the state after a hill of rock and mud crashed into a tea plantation at a workers’ hostel.
The way the announcements were made for the passengers also did not help, passengers said. The cabin crew used Hindi and English, India’s most widely spoken languages.
But this was a special repatriation flight, carried out by the Indian government to rescue civilians stranded in the Persian Gulf during the coronavirus pandemic. Most of the passengers were working-class people (and their families) from Kerala State who had done jobs such as clearing tables or driving trucks. They speak Malayalam, Kerala’s tongue.
“They had no idea they had to carry them with their belts,” said Riyas Madaparambathu, another passenger who worked in a restaurant in Dubai. He said more lives might have been saved if the crew had made the announcements in Malayalam, “so that everyone could have understood the instructions.”
Saturday, officials said they found the black box of the plane. Most of the surviving passengers remained in more than a dozen hospitals. Indian media reported that after some positive tests for coronavirus, survivors were not yet allowed to leave the hospitals.
Many were clearly shocked.
“The flight went well,” said Muhammed Ali Meethal, who spoke from his hospital bed by phone. “The pilot announced that we were going to the country. There was no warning as a signal of some kind of impending punishment. “
But after the plane jumped off the runway and off the hill, he said, “There was a kiss. And then a complete silence. I could smell death.”
“I want to erase those memories,” he said, breaking down in tears. “I have to keep the fear at bay.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting
