‘This is a bonus life I’m living. I’m in borrowed heaven,’ says Karachi plane crash survivor
When Zafar Masud ponders the difference between his miracle survival and the death which claimed nearly all his fellow passengers, one of the most significant reasons for his survival seems to come down to his simple preference for an aisle seat.
When Mr Masud now looks back to that fateful morning two years ago, many of his actions are loaded with significance. His decision to take a later flight than originally planned, or the flight unusually running on time have become important points in his survival story. But perhaps none more so than his late decision to swap from a place by the window, to seat 1C on the aisle.
“I think that in my survival that the location of that seat plays a very significant role,” Mr Masud told The Sunday Telegraph.
Today marks the second anniversary of the horrific Karachi plane crash when a jet from the national carrier, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), came down in a residential area after an aborted landing. Mr Masud was one of only two survivors. The remaining 97 crew and passengers all died, along with one person on the ground.
As one of the country’s most prominent bankers, he is used to a world of hard numbers. But in the past two years he has had to come to terms with the life-changing personal enormity of being nearly a sole survivor in a crash where the probabilities seem impossible to reconcile.
“I have no doubts about the fact that it was a miracle,” he explains from his office in his bank’s Lahore headquarters. “It can’t be named anything else.”
The crash left him with an abiding survivors’ guilt, but also transformed his view of life.
He has set up a foundation that will raise awareness for passenger safety and campaign for new laws where needed, and also pushes his bank to spend more on the arts.
“This is a bonus life that I am leading,” he says. “I am living in borrowed heaven. I have to make sure that I do all of that stuff that I am required to do, that leaves a positive impact on people in their lives.”
Mr Masud had only taken charge at the Bank of Punjab a few weeks before the crash, after a prestigious career including stints at American Express, Citibank, Barclays and others.
On the morning of May 22 2020, he had been due to take an early flight, but being a habitual late riser, changed his ticket to a later PIA flight laid on especially to take the extra Eid traffic.
Mr Masud’s window seat had been booked by a new assistant who did not know his preference for sitting in the aisle. The banker asked him to change it.
He worked on the plane and recalls nothing out of the ordinary until they came into land at Karachi. Instead of landing, the Airbus A320 struck the runway hard three times and took off again to make another approach. A preliminary air crash investigation found the plane had come in unusually fast and steep, as the pilots seemed distracted by a discussion about Covid.
Investigators found the pilots lowered the landing gear 10 miles out, but inexplicably raised it again with about five miles to go. The bumps felt by passengers were the plane scraping along the tarmac on its engines, before taking off again.
Mr Masud said he was not overly alarmed until he noticed the reaction of stewards seated nearby who were crying and praying. The pilots tried to bring the plane around again, but the impact on the ground had damaged the engines and as the plane turned, they gave out. At that moment the cockpit door flew open and Mr Masud could see the plane was not going to make it.
He fainted before impact. He believes he owes his survival to his seat falling out of the plane when it broke up after striking buildings in Karachi’s Model Colony. His seat appears to have struck a three-storey building, then fallen onto a car bonnet. Three people were in the car and helped save him. He was dragged from the burning crash site with nothing more than a badly broken arm and torn ligaments in his knee.
“What is the probability when the plane was crashing in that area, that someone would have been sitting in their car as well?” he asks. “Very remote, right?”