The passenger plane crash was India’s first for 10 years A dozing pilot was to blame for a plane crash in May in southern India which killed almost 160 people, an official investigation has reportedly found.
According to an advance copy of the report seen by Indian media, the Air India Express plane landed in Mangalore at the wrong height and angle.
The Serbian pilot, Zlatko Glusica, was “disorientated” having been asleep for much of the three-hour flight.
The tragedy was the country’s first major air crash in 10 years.
Data recorders captured the sound of snoring, according to the Hindustan Times.
Glusica was found to have been affected by “sleep inertia” after his nap.
Co-pilot H S Ahluwalia is heard repeatedly warning the Serb to abort landing and try again.
Seconds before the plane erupted into a fireball, voice recordings picked up the co-pilot saying: “We don’t have runway left”.
The Boeing 737 overshot, plunged into a steep gorge and burst into flames. Only eight people survived.
Most of the passengers on the low-cost flight from Dubai to Mangalore were Indian migrant workers returning from the Gulf.
The report was submitted to India’s civil aviation ministry on Tuesday ahead of its official publication.
A government official who did not want to be named told the Associated Press news agency that media reports about the findings were accurate.
But the report would only be made public once it had been presented to the Indian parliament.
Glusica was said in the aftermath of the tragedy to have had 10,000 hours of flying time, including experience of Mangalore’s airport.
The civil aviation minister noted at the time that Mangalore had a short runway and a limited area after that to accommodate planes that overshot the landing strip.
The plane missed its landing threshold by about 2,000 feet (600 metres).
India’s air safety record has been good in the past decade, despite a rapid increase in the number of private airlines and air travel in the country.
The last major crash happened in the city of Patna in July 2000, killing at least 50 people.
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