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 smashed into the seat back in front of him, in Row 15, splitting open his chin. He was dazed.
“When I opened my eyes and looked around,” he said, “there was only one row in front of me.”
The front of the plane had torn off.
With the crash investigation just starting, Indian aviation officials are already beginning to pin the blame on the pilot, not the runway.
“The basic problem, as we understand it in this incident, is that on a runway of 8,500 feet, the plane landed after crossing one third of the strip, beyond 3,000 feet,” Arun Kumar, India’s director general of civil aviation, said 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 happen within the first 500 feet of the strip.”
“The rules of aviation are too well laid out,” Mr. Kumar added. “Either the pilot goes around or should not have landed at all.”
“The rules of aviation are too well laid out,” Mr. Kumar added. “Either the pilot goes around or should not have landed at all.”
The crash was very similar to another, much deadlier Indian air accident at a tabletop runway in 2010, which had prompted a closer look at similar hilltop runways. India has around four to five of them, officials said.
The 2010 crash involved the same kind of plane, a Boeing 737 belonging to the same airline, Air India Express, and a similar runway with steep gorges on each side. In that case, the aircraft skidded off a hill in Mangalore, fell into a valley and burst into flames. More than 150 people were killed.
After that, the Indian civil aviation ministry formed a safety advisory council that included aviation experts such as Capt. Mohan Ranganathan, a pilot who wrote the 2011 report warning that Kozhikode’s Runway 10 was dangerous. Some of his recommendations, like adding a safety zone at the end of the runway, were heeded, at least in part.
But on Saturday, Captain Ranganathan said in an interview that he was dismayed to learn that the pilot tried to land in the very circumstances that he had warned about.
“Landing in rain with a tailwind is the most dangerous way you can think of landing,” he said, especially on Kozhikode’s Runway 10.
For a plane to crash, a bunch of things usually have to go wrong, which seems to have been the case in Flight 1344.