Dubai/Abu Dhabi: Passengers who were originally booked on the Air India Express flight that crashed on Saturday have told of the unique twists of fate that led to them not boarding the plane.
Steven Rego, 15, was due to fly back to Mangalore on flight IX812 after taking a short break from his studies to visit his mother and father in Dubai.
He thought his mother had booked his return flight for Saturday evening. However, he did not realise until after the crash that she had mistakenly booked him onto the fateful flight that departed Dubai early Saturday morning.
Chilling phone call
"I got a phone call from one of my cousins this [yesterday] morning who said my name was all over Indian TV and that I was supposedly dead," he said.
"I had no idea that my mother had booked me on that flight by mistake until my brother looked into the situation. She was supposed to have booked me on the Saturday evening flight."
Kunhikannan Chandu, 51, is the manager of Lulu Hypermarket in Al Qusais.
He was due to fly to Mangalore on the flight but his superior told him he had to postpone his trip due to urgent work commitments.
"I had booked my ticket to fly to Mangalore on Saturday morning. I was going to help my son with his admission to engineering college," he said.
"However, I was told by my manager that I could not go because there was too much important work to get through. I postponed my flight to Saturday evening and then I woke up to this terrible news."
Merwyn D'Souza, 38, was visiting his sister and her family in Dubai.
He initially booked a ticket on the doomed flight by mistake but changed his flight to Saturday at the last minute.
When some TV news channels and websites showed her name on the list of the dead passengers, Thresiamma Philip , 50, an Indian nurse, thought that it was somebody else with a similar name.
"When I saw my details on a website, I checked my ticket and was surprised to find that I had missed my flight," she said.
"The departure time was written as 1.15am on May 22 [yesterday morning] but I mistook it as 1.15 pm."
Her husband said her miscalculation saved him from a tragedy that would have haunted him for the rest of his life.
