Monica Khanna: Everything To Know About The Pilot Who Saved Lives Of Her Passengers

Captain Monica Khanna is the pilot of the Patna-Delhi SpiceJet Boeing 737 flight that had to make an emergency landing after an engine caught fire mid-air. The engine caught fire after take-off in Patna and Khanna made an emergency landing.

Monica Khanna saved the lives of her 185 passengers after the engine caught fire by switching off the affected engine and safely performing an emergency landing at Patna airport. All passengers were unharmed and evacuated safely.

Captain Khanna had to perform an emergency overweight landing, which is a landing made at a gross weight excess of the structural landing weight for the model. Overweight landings are generally made when the pilot has to return to the take-off airport, which is what Khanna had to do.

Monica Khanna Wiki Bio

Captain Monica Khanna is a highly-qualified pilot at Indian airline SpiceJet Limited. Khanna joined SpiceJet Limited in 2018 and was the pilot in command of the Patna-Delhi SpiceJet Boeing 737.

Khanna has gone viral due to her quick thinking and skill while navigating the plane. Social media users and airline representatives have praised her for saving the lives of her passengers.

Director of Jay Prakash Narayan Patna airport Anchal Prakash spoke about what went wrong with the plane engine. He said, “The left engine of the SpiceJet flight SG-723 was damaged and caught fire due to bird-hitting.”

Prakash then praised Khanna and her first officer Balpreet Singh Bhatia for their “sensible and cool-headed approach”.

The SpiceJet Chief of Flight Operations Gurucharan Arora said that Khanna and Bhatia were “calm throughout and handled the aircraft well".

Arora added that when the plane landed, only a single engine on the plane was working. The engineers confirmed that the three blades and an engine were damaged by a bird hit.

Pilot in command Monica Khanna and first officer Balpreet Singh Bhatia joined the investigation conducted by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the internal investigation conducted by SpiceJet. Both Khanna and Bhatia won’t be deployed for flight operations for several days.

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