This image does not show pilot of Air India Flight that crashed in Ahmedabad

This image shows Deepak Vasant Sathe, the captain of an Air India Express that crashed in Kerala in 2020.

The Air India passenger plane from Ahmedabad to London carrying 242 passengers and crew crashed just moments after taking off from the Ahmedabad airport on 12 June resulting in the deaths of 241 people, with only one passenger surviving. Following the accident an image of a middle-aged man is going viral on social media claiming to be Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, the ill-fated aircraft’s pilot. The crash killed 241 passengers and crew members, including Sumeet Sabharwal.

Let’s check the truth.

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Fact Check- 

We started our investigation with a keyword search for Captain Sumeet Sabharwal which led us to several news reports, seen here and here, on the pilots of the crashed Air India flight, sharing a photo of Captain Sumeet Sabharwal. 

From these news reports we can clearly understand that the person in the viral image is not Captain Sumeet Sabharwal.

So, we conducted a reverse image search of the viral image and the results led us to several reports from August 2020 sharing the same viral image. According to these reports, this image is of Wing Commander Deepak Vasant Sathe, the captain of an Air India Express flight that crashed in Kerala’s Kozhikode airport on 7 August, 2020. Deepak Sathe and his copilot Deepak Kumar were among the 18 people killed in the incident.

According to reports, on 7 August, 2020, Air India Express Flight IX-1344 from Dubai crashed while landing in Kozhikode, Kerala under heavy rain. The Boeing 737-800 arriving from Dubai went off the runway, and the main section of the plane was torn wide open as a result of the crash. Over 100 passengers were injured, and 21 people died, including both pilots. 

Based on these evidences, we can understand that this image does not show pilot of Air India Flight that crashed in Ahmedabad.

Conclusion-Fact Crescendo found the claim made along with the viral image to be Misleading. This image shows Deepak Vasant Sathe, the captain of an Air India Express that crashed in Kerala in 2020, not the pilot of Air India Flight that crashed in Ahmedabad.