Delhi captain among 189 dead was expected home for Diwali
NEWDELHI/JAKARTA: Captain Bhavye Suneja, a 31-year-old Indian with 6,000 hours of flying experience, was at the controls of the Lion Air jet that crashed into the sea with 189 people on board after a sudden and sharp dive on Monday, just minutes after taking off from Jakarta.
Assisted by co-pilot Harvino, who went by only one name, Suneja was flying the nearly new Boeing 737 MAX 8 when it lost contact with ground officials, 13 minutes after departing from the Indonesian capital.
From Delhi’s Mayur Vihar, Suneja studied at the Ahlcon Public School till 2005. Neighbours said his family was expecting Suneja home this Diwali.
While the airline captain’s immediate family refused to share any information, his cousin Kapish Gandhi spoke to The Guardian about the incident.
He said Suneja’s parents learned of the disaster early in the morning and were booked to fly to Jakarta the same night. “He loved his job, he was very much interested in it,” the report quoted Gandhi as saying. “We saw it on television this morning and didn’t know whether to believe it,” he added. “We are all speechless.”
Lion Air Flight JT 610 was flying north from Jakarta to the city of Pangkal Pinang on the island of Bangka when it went down in the Java Sea. The National Search and Rescue Agency said that a tugboat crew saw the plane crash in Karawang Bay northeast of Jakarta and that skies were clear.
By Monday afternoon, rescuers said it was unlikely that survivors would be found.
“I suspect all the passengers are dead,” said Marine Brig. Gen. Bambang Suryo, director of operations for the search and rescue agency.
A spokesperson for Indonesia’s air navigation authority said the aircraft crew had requested permission to turn around minutes after takeoff. “The request was permitted,” the spokesperson said. “Then we lost contact. It was very quick, maybe around one minute.”
According to the flight captain’s Linkedin profile, he received his pilot’s licence from Bel Air International in 2009.
He was associated with Lion Air as an airline pilot since March 2011. It said that before Lion Air, Suneja also served as a trainee pilot with Emirates for three months in 2010.
Emirates, however, denied hiring him. “Emirates can confirm that the pilot was never an employee or trainee at Emirates airline,” it said in a statement.