Air India Express Crash: How ‘Hero’ Captain Deepak Sathe Saved Hundreds of Lives

As per unconfirmed reports, Captain Sathe turned off the plane's engine right before the crash, thus ensuring that it didn't catch fire upon crash landing, and, in the process, saving several lives.

New Delhi: Even as the official death toll from last evening’s Air India Express crash off Kozhikode International Airport’s tabletop runway has spiked to 18, many are saying that the results of the tragedy could have been much worse had the aircraft caught fire.

However, fortunately, despite plunging 35-feet into a gorge and breaking into two, the aircraft didn’t catch fire, thus saving hundreds of lives. And the man being hailed for saving so many lives is the commander of the ill-fated Dubai-Kozhikode flight, Captain Deepak Vasant Sathe, who is among the casualties, along with his First Officer, Akhilesh Kumar.

Quoting unconfirmed reports, India Today said that Captain Sathe, who retired as a Wing Commander with the Indian Air Force (IAF) in 2003, turned off the plane’s engine right before the crash, thus ensuring that it didn’t catch fire upon crash landing, and, in the process, saving several lives.

Captain Deepak Vasant Sathe is a very experienced hand at pilots seat. He saved many a lives in yesterday’s AI Express plane crash at Kozhikode by switching off the engine. Sadgati to his soul. Salutes to his professionalism even at the cost of life .

— B L Santhosh (@blsanthosh) August 8, 2020

Survivors, too, have credited Captain Sathe, an alumnus of Pune-based prestigious National Defence Academy (NDA) and, subsequently, Dundigal’s Air Force Academy (AFA), with saving their lives.

“It was raining heavily. The pilot had given a warning before landing saying the weather was really bad. He tried for safe landing twice but lost control. It was a miraculous escape for many”, Hindustan Times quoted one of the survivors as saying.

Notably, last evening’s mishap was India’s worst aviation disaster in a decade after May 2010’s Mangalore air tragedy, which took place under near-identical circumstances.