IC 814: When Captain Devi Sharan accepted he was ready to crash the plane in Lahore, stopped after seeing people on ground

When the flight finally reached Lahore, the runway lights at the Lahore airport were switched off, and the runway was closed. With fuel running out, Sharan braced himself for a crash landing. He said, “I reached Lahore, everything was closed,” he said. “Airport runway was closed. I didn’t have any choice. I didn’t have any fuel to go back to Amritsar. I had only one choice: to crash the plane,” he added

Despite his intention to crash, Sharan decided to delay the landing after noticing people on the ground. The situation took a dramatic turn when Pakistani airport authorities, realizing the imminent danger, gave the flight clearance to land just in time. “In the meantime, (Pakistani airport officials) came to know we have to crash this airplane. Then they gave me runway (clearance) … I had about one and half minutes of fuel left so luckily I landed on the runway,” he said.

However, the ordeal for Sharan and his passengers was far from over. After refueling at the Lahore airport, the hijackers demanded that the plane fly to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where they released 26 passengers and the body of a passenger who had been killed aboard the flight.

The hijacking crisis stretched on for almost a week, during which intense negotiations took place between the hijackers and the Indian government. The standoff eventually ended when the Indian government agreed to release three terrorists imprisoned in India—Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, Masood Azhar, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar—in exchange for the safe release of the remaining passengers and crew of flight IC 814.

Captain Devi Sharan later wrote the book Flight Into Fear which became the inspiration for Anubhav Sinha’s Netflix series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack. The show sees Vijay Varma playing the role of Captain Devi Sharan.