A sleepy pilot who approached the runway at the wrong angle and ignored warning signs was to blame for a passenger plane crash in southern India in May that claimed 158 lives, reports said Wednesday.

A Court of Inquiry probe concluded the Air India pilot Zlatko Glusica, from Serbia, was asleep for much of the three-hour flight and was “disorientated” when the plane started to descend, the Hindustan Times reported.

The low-cost Air India Express plane flying from Dubai to the city of Mangalore overshot the runway, plunged into a gorge and burst into flames. Eight people survived the inferno.

The official crash report, which hasn’t been released publicly, was submitted to the civil aviation ministry on Tuesday.

Voice recordings picked up co-pilot H.S. Ahluwalia saying: “We don’t have runway left,” seconds before the disaster.

The report revealed that the plane touched down 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) along the airport’s hilltop runway, which is about 8,000 feet long, the Hindustan Times said.

It added Glusica was suffering “sleep inertia” and that experts had concluded that the plane would still have landed safely if the pilots had applied the emergency brakes instead of trying to take off again.

Glusica had 10,200 hours of flying experience, and co-pilot Ahluwalia had clocked 3,650 hours.

Survivors managed to escape the broken fuselage before it was engulfed in flames, an intense blaze that made the subsequent task of removing the badly charred bodies a gruesome task for rescue teams.

Most of the dead were migrant workers returning from the Gulf, where many Indians from southern states find low-paid employment as construction workers or domestic staff in cities such as Dubai.

They send much of their earnings back to India as remittances, and return to home for their annual leave.

The six-member court was set up to investigate the cause of India’s first major air crash since 2000 and its worst aviation disaster since 1996, when two jets collided in mid-air over New Delhi, killing nearly 350 people.
 
November 17, 2010
AFP

• A Permanent Economic Emergency