Sumeet Sabharwal (55), had been considering early retirement to care for his octogenarian father. His co-pilot for the day, Clive Kunder (32), had just started to build momentum in his career.
Together, they brought nearly 10,000 hours of flight experience to the cockpit. Now, it will be the final moments of their last flight, ill-fated Air India Flight 171, that investigators will be studying for months to come. The flight, which took off on Thursday from Ahmedabad city, India, bound for London, lasted less than a minute before crashing into the campus of a nearby medical college, leaving at least 270 people dead.
The impact ignited a fireball so intense that the bodies of most of the victims are damaged beyond recognition, officials have said.
Investigators have sealed the crash site and the hostels of the medical college that were hit. They have recovered the aircraft’s flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. They hope the conversation between Sabharwal and Kunder, along with other information recorded in these “black box” devices, can shed light on whether the plane crashed because of mechanical failure, human error or some other combination of factors.
Regardless of what went wrong, officials and experts agree on one point: the pilots had virtually no time to regain control of the craft as it began going down.
The aircraft carrying 242 people left the runway at 1:39pm local time and had travelled just over a mile, passing slums along the airport’s perimeter. It never climbed higher than 650ft, according to India’s civil aviation secretary, Samir Kumar Sinha. Within seconds of take-off, the aircraft “started sinking”, he said.
Sabharwal issued a “Mayday” call to the air traffic controller, declaring a full emergency, but the plane went down seconds later.
“When the air traffic controller tried to contact the plane, there was no response,” Sinha said at a news conference. Only one person on the plane survived.
Sabharwal and Kunder, who lived in Mumbai, had parents who built their careers in the world of air travel. Sabharwal’s father had worked as an officer in the civil aviation authority of India before retiring, while Kunder’s mother worked as a flight attendant, also for Air India.
Sabharwal, who was unmarried, was the primary caregiver for his father, who is now in his late 80s. His mother died three years ago, and his sister lives in Delhi with her family. The captain’s neighbours and friends described him as a soft-spoken, reserved man, whom they often saw accompanying his father for walks in the garden of their housing complex whenever he was home.
“His father would be alone when he [the captain] went flying,” said Sanjeev Pai, a retired wing commander who said he was a friend and neighbour.
Pai said the elder Sabharwal has been grieving since learning of the crash.
“He doesn’t speak much,” Pai said in an interview. “We try to offer him tea, et cetera, but he won’t have anything out of sadness.”
According to Dilip Lande, a local politician who visited Sabharwal snr after the crash, the captain had told his father three days before the flight that he had been thinking of retiring to spend more time at his side.
“An hour before the Air India flight took off, he spoke to his father and told him that he would call again after landing in London,” Lande said. “That call never came.”
Kunder had joined the airline only a few years ago and had logged more than 1,100 hours of flight time.
He studied aircraft maintenance engineering at the Bombay Flying Club, a pilot training institute, before taking up commercial flying in Florida, said Mihir Bhagwati, the club’s chair.
Indian news channels reported that Kunder’s parents had been visiting his sister in Australia when Flight 171 crashed. The family flew to Ahmedabad on Friday to join hundreds of other relatives waiting for authorities to identify and release the remains of those who died.
Rev Sam Muni, of the UBM Christa Kanthi Church in Mumbai, said Kunder had been a regular in his parish since childhood, often attending Mass with his parents. He described him as a “very humble person” and said the last time he had seen him was at an Easter service.
This Sunday, the parish celebrated Mass in Kunder’s name, Muni said.
“We prayed for all the people who lost their lives in the crash, especially of Clive’s family,” he said. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
