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The hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC 814 in December 1999 shocked the nation. Terrorists took control of a passenger aircraft flying from Kathmandu to Delhi and diverted it to Kandahar. Capt Devi Sharan, the pilot in-charge of the flight, was in a tricky spot, as he tried to keep the hijackers at bay without putting the passengers in further danger. In Anubhav Sinha’s retelling of the story on Netflix’s IC814: The Kandahar Hijack, Vijay Varma plays the role of the captain. After the incident in December 1999, Capt Devi Sharan explained why he had to take off from Amritsar, which was seen as a turning point in the entire story, because the flight was no longer in Indian airspace afterwards.
The hijackers made themselves known when the plane was flying over Lucknow. Capt Devi Sharan had convinced them to land at Amritsar to refuel, and was hoping that the Indian authorities would take action there, but that did not happen. The plane then went to Lahore and once it was out of India, the rescue and negotiation operation got even more complicated. Just a few days after the hijack, Capt Devi Sharan was asked in an interview why he took off from Amritsar and did not shut off the plane’s engines. At the time, he told Rediff in an interview that the “hijackers were very suspicious because I had told them that we would refuel at Amritsar in five minutes and we would be able to fly. But the refueling was not done. So they got jittery. They asked me not to shut down the engine. They kept on moving the aircraft from one place to another because they feared that some kind of commando operation would be carried out against them and they would be killed.”
He said that when the bowser did not come, the hijackers ordered him to takeoff. “I told them that I cannot takeoff because I am in the middle of the runway. They asked me to crash the aircraft. I had no choice but to take a calculated risk.”
Flight IC 814 was in Amritsar for a total of 45 minutes, and Capt Devi Sharan was expecting the authorities to intervene during that time. In another interview with the same publication a year later, he said that he was hoping that someone would block the aircraft so it would become impossible for them to take off. “We were there for 45 minutes. I was hoping that someone would have the sense to park the refuel tank in front of the aircraft. But nothing happened. Suddenly they got a phone call on their satellite phone and they panicked. They asked me to take off. They told me if I did not take off then they would start killing the passengers. They said they had killed four people,” he said.
The aircraft went to Lahore from Amritsar, and eventually went to Kandahar, where it remained stranded for days. One passenger named Rupin Katyal was killed by the terrorists. Capt Devi Sharan later wrote the book Flight Into Fear which became the inspiration for Sinha’s Netflix series.
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