Aerospace Diary

Neelam Mathews Feb 18, 2016 M UMBAI: Today’s release of the film ‘Neerja’, produced by Fox Star India, had many audiences across the country choked with emotion and left in awe of a 22-year old flight attendant. Neerja Bhanot was shot by terrorists while helping passengers escape Pan Am Flight 73, a Boeing 747 flying from Mumbai to Frankfurt and New York via Karachi, which was hijacked on 5 September 1986. On that fateful day in Karachi, as four terrorists rushed in, Neerja shouted the hijack code to a flight attendant who conveyed it to the cockpit. She also hid the passports of 41 American passengers on the plane, preventing them from being identified. In the final hour, she gave her own life, while shielding three small children from gunfire on the 747. Twenty passengers were killed by the hijackers and over 100 injured. Neerja was posthumously granted bravery awards by Pakistan, India, and the US. India’s largest airline, budget operator Indi...

Posted By Neelam Mathews March 30, 2015 Welcome to Episode 022 of the #PaxEx Podcast. Our guest for this episode is Neelam Mathews. Based in Delhi, India, Neelam has been writing about Asian aviation and beyond for over a decade. She has done long stretches of writing for  Aviation Week ,  AIN ,  Jane’s Airports , and  is now a contributor to  RGN . The aviation industry is grappling with another tragedy, the crash of a Germanwings Airbus A320 in the French Alps. Audio from the cockpit voice recorder indicates that the captain was locked out of the cockpit, and couldn’t get back in. The French prosecutor in the case   asserts that the first officer deliberately flew the A320, with 150 people on board, into the French mountainside . However, the guts of the flight data recorder have not yet been found. This crash – and the fact that sourcing information from the physical black boxes is crucial to understanding what happened in any accident –...