Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, pilot of the ill-fated Air India Flight 171, has been hailed for doing all he could, including issuing a Mayday call to the air traffic controller around 1.39 pm on June 12, to avert tragedy.

Amol Yadav, former deputy chief pilot, Jet Airways, who is now a businessman, said, “When an aircraft is high in the sky, it’s possible to save more lives on the ground. For instance, if a plane is 10,000 feet above and both engines fail, it does not come down immediately. It glides for almost up to 30 miles [48.2 km]. It takes approximately five to seven minutes for the aircraft to touch the ground. This is when the pilot can take stock of the situation and turn the aircraft to the least populated area or a plain ground. In this accident, the biggest drawback was the fact that the aircraft wasn’t much higher above ground level. Even then, Captain Sabharwal, using all his experience, tried to make the descent to the least populated area available within the radius that he had. Unfortunately, some lives on the ground couldn’t be saved.”