On August 18, 2015, a Jet Airways flight battled cyclonic weather while circling above the runways of Cochin. After three failed landing attempts caused by poor visibility, the aircraft diverted to Trivandrum, where it finally landed only after another three attempts and a mayday call warning of critically low fuel. All 141 passengers survived, yet the DGCA soon launched an investigation to determine whether the captain’s seemingly heroic decision to attempt a blind landing could have been avoided.
“Runway 34,” directed by Ajay Devgn, fictionalises the incident through Captain Vikrant Khanna and his near-mythic landing in Trivandrum, descending through violent storm clouds with his eyes closed and a cigarette resting between his lips. The sequence is staged as something glorious, tender, and unmistakably human. Yet beneath its spectacle lingers the same unsettling question that followed the real incident: could the captain have avoided it?
Runway 34 (2022) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Was Vikrant Khanna Hungover During the Flight?
The film starts with Captain Vikrant Khanna riding a car to his hotel in Dubai, on a call with his wife and little daughter, promising that he would return for his daughter’s birthday in two days. Vikrant assures his daughter, a little too flamboyantly perhaps, that he has a photographic memory and never forgets things. Shortly after, Vikrant reaches the hotel and receives a call from his long-time buddy, who would not leave him alone if he did not party with him that night. While Vikrant tries pushing him off, stating he has a flight the next day, he eventually gives in.
Vikrant joins his friend at the club, where his friend asks him to get the number of another club-goer, a woman called Anjali Mathur, offering his car as a bet if Vikrant succeeds. Vikrant is charismatic, and he invites the woman to party with them, and the night stretches into one of drinking and letting loose. It is early in the morning the next day when Vikrant victoriously drives his friend’s car to the hotel, drunk and already breaking rules, and settles in for sleep before his flight. For a pilot, getting enough sleep before a flight is a non-negotiable. The lack of it disorients them, and not only puts them in life-risk, but also the hundreds of passengers whose lives depend on them.
Although hungover, Vikrant wakes up in time for his flight and reaches the airport, covering his bloodshot eyes with his aviators. He meets first officer Tanya Alberqueque (a callback to the “Breaking Bad” episode, perhaps?), who is smitten by his heroic antics in a previous landing in Hong Kong, which went viral. In the flight briefing, Vikrant barely takes a look at the weather reports. However, when the briefing officer questions him, he can recall page by page what is written on it; photographic memory, it seems! In this first act, Vikrant’s confidence can sometimes be confused with arrogance, but it seems to fit his character. So when Tanya asks him a few times whether he is feeling alright, Vikrant dismisses her by mentioning his hours of flying, which makes him way more experienced than Tanya.
On board, Vikrant does routine activities while engaging in light conversations with Tanya. He tells her that he has been flying for six days straight and wants badly to go home. He also adds that there are days when he loves his job, and days that he does not, and he is still trying to figure out what day it is that day. While this love-hate relationship may be harmless and innocent for an IT employee, for a pilot, or a doctor, it could turn into near-fatal mistakes. The weather report, which Vikrant glanced through, warned them about an upcoming cyclonic storm through which they had to fly.
The flight takes off from Doha and is set to fly for nearly four hours before it reaches Cochin. Vikrant seems tired and gets a brief shut-eye while on air. Shortly after, he asks for a coffee and a disprin, and visits the toilet, eyeing the miniature alcohol bottles on board. After a brief break, Vikrant is back again and attempts a landing in Cochin. The visibility is extremely low, and the alternate landing spot is in Bangalore. Tanya suggests that they turn the flight towards Bangalore, but Vikrant wants to attempt landing at Cochin, probably to get home sooner.
However, when the Cochin landing attempts fail, he is left with barely any fuel to journey towards Bangalore. Instead, he decides to land at Trivandrum, just thirty minutes of flying distance from Cochin. While landing at Trivandrum sounds like a feasible option, it is not so. Trivandrum is too close to Cochin and can be affected by the same weather conditions, while Bangalore would have been the safer option. However, with the fuel constraints, only one option remains. Vikrant tries getting the weather stats from the ground authority at Trivandrum, but a small miscommunication takes place, which ends up being dangerous for the route of Skyline 777.
Why Did Vikrant Land at Runway 34?
As Vikrant and Tanya touch base with the ground authorities, they mark it clear for a landing in Trivandrum. The person in charge is dealing with a personal loss – his daughter’s death. His mind feels as clouded as the sky after he decided to return to work, even after being sanctioned for a month of leave. While he tries to push the clouds away by working, he is constantly coughing. When the weather reports arrive with the warning that no landing attempts are to be made at Trivandrum airport, he collapses with his coughing fits and has to be taken outside. While he leaves, he could never communicate to Skyline 777 that the visibility and weather conditions have become impossible for a landing.
Vikrant and Tanya head towards Trivandrum, assuming the weather is going to be on their side. The passengers are throwing a fit after this sudden route change, and Vikrant goes to assure them. He comforts an elderly woman, Alma, who was going to Cochin for treatment, and wins over the confidence of the passengers. When he heads to Trivandrum, the sky is pitch-dark, and his communication has been restored with the control room.
The control room is shocked to learn of this unaware landing, and puts all hands on deck to save Skyline 777. The flight is running low on fuel, and only a couple of attempts can be made before the flight crashes with all its passengers and crew. At first, Vikrant tries for Runway 16. The wheels touch the ground, but the crosswinds are too strong for the aircraft to land stably. When it makes a 180-degree turn in the runway, the control room starts calling the nearest hospital and fire brigade, preparing for a massacre. They think the pilot is a “lunatic”.
When only one attempt is left, Vikrant takes a call. He asks Runway 34 to be cleared for a landing. We will not know until the end of the film why he made such an unusual decision, but he proceeds for a landing. With an unlit cigarette in his mouth, Vikrant says that he will attempt to land “blindly”, closes his eyes, and lowers the aircraft on Runway 34. The aircraft hits the ground with impact, propels itself on the landing strip with strong tailwinds pushing it, and as it advances towards a cliff at the end of the runway, it finally stops. Skyline 777’s flight may have been rough, but all 150 passengers are safe when it lands.
Runway 34 (2022) Movie Ending Explained:
Was Vikrant Khanna Flying Drunk?
The first act of “Runway 34” is a solid ten with adrenaline and charisma balancing each other in the right amounts. However, in the second act, Vikrant has to answer questions about this undue heroism to the DGCA. Investigator Narayan Vedant, played by the incomparable Amitabh Bachchan, takes the lead in Skyline 777’s case, questioning whether the pilot was indeed a hero or made a series of mistakes endangering passengers’ lives.
The first confusion that the film plants into our minds is the bottle of gin that Vikrant eyes before entering the washroom. The film does a good job with visual cues, almost implying that Vikrant had gulped it down in the washroom, but if you look closely, Vikrant holds the coffee cup in one hand, and his other hand is empty when he enters the washroom.
However, the DGCA launches a strict investigation against Vikrant Khanna, attempting a breath analyser test and the checking of vitals the next morning. The analyser turns out to be faulty (in all honesty, they could have brought another, but they left the results ambiguous), and the advocate for Skyline later claims that she put in efforts to “clear” the medical reports. Skyline’s owner is also wary of Narayan Vedant’s involvement in the case, which may affect his company’s reputation and shares right before an upcoming merger with another airline.
While Vikrant has been declared a hero by the media, his conscience is heavy when he learns that the elderly woman died on her way to the hospital, suffering a cardiac arrest. The investigation proceeds, and Narayan Vedant makes Vikrant go through rounds of polygraphy, intense questioning, and cross-questioning of Tanya, which ultimately breaks her.
He brings out the bottle of gin, asking Vikrant whether he drank it, and Vikrant passes the question under polygraphy. He calmly adds that his “bottle to throttle” time was 15 hours, which is well over the mandate of 12 hours. As the investigation proceeds, Vikrant learns to face his demons. He apologises to the dead woman’s daughter and finally faces Narayan Vedant, telling him that he can demonstrate and prove that he landed in Runway 34 with a conscious mind. He demonstrates the same using a flight simulator and lands the flight safely, closed-eyed, with Vedant by his side.
Finally, before the verdict is announced, Vikrant tells the investigation committee that he used to fly Tarachand Ahluwalia’s private flight before he joined Skyline, and Runway 34 was a go-to runway for the private jet to land. Vikrant remembers every turn of it on the back of his mind, and therefore, he chose the specific runway when he had to land blindly. The investigation committee suspends the ground personnel who failed to convey the weather report, and suspends Vikrant’s license for three months – the bare minimum penalty for pilots breaking procedure. Narayan Vedant later tells Vikrant that he did not want to deprive the country of an experienced pilot.
All said and done, the film does show Vikrant’s comeback, and his small defiance of breaking the rule by lighting a cigarette– the poison he prefers, but the question looms in our minds: was he drunk after all? The gin bottle was retrieved from the trash can with no explanation as to who had consumed it. A brief flashback answers this question, and also makes Vikrant the hero of the film one more time.
Perplexed with the weather, cabin crew member Mihika, who brought Vikrant the coffee, gulped down the gin. Mihika confessed this to Vikrant right before the trial and begged him not to disclose it since she could lose her job. Protecting Mihika, who is a single mother with a two-year-old waiting at home, Vikrant winged this responsibility till the last moment of the trial, never disclosing that it was not he who drank on-air.
Runway 34 (2022) Movie Themes Analysed:
The Human Behind the Machines
From the very beginning, Captain Vikrant Khanna seems too confident and proud in his role. He flaunts his over sixteen thousand flying hours and probably felt that it was okay to go reckless the night before his flight. Sure, he was overconfident and careless in his role, but he was also overworked. He had been flying for six days straight and wanted to go home to his family. While Vikrant’s actions are inexcusable, the work-life balance in his scenario does not sound too ideal either. The investigation primarily wants to hold Vikrant accountable, but it overlooks the control room personnel who could not relay the information at the right time, until the very end.
While Vikrant’s fatigue figures in, coupled with his “hubris”, a fatal pride in tragedies, the mental state of a father who had lost his daughter but is keeping a sensitive mechanism alive, such as aviation, sounds questionable too. From the passengers’ seats, it seems almost automated. We reach the airport, we check in and board our flights, and put in our headphones, often falling asleep before we reach a new destination. “Runway 34” shows the other side of the coin: the grit, the meticulous calculations, and the prowess that it requires from the people who keep the chain going, ensuring a safe passage.
While Vikrant maintained the protocols on paper, it also holds that he made mistakes in making the right decisions at the right moment, and the nominal adherence to protocols cannot justify the mistakes. However, keeping all things in mind, the judgment in the film was made keeping in mind the human margin of errors, which proves Vikrant is neither a hero nor a criminal, but simply a human being who acted wrong, but then saved the day in the end with his skill sets and experience. A machine could not do either.
“Runway 34” is an interesting film for the themes it engages with. Its first act is tense and sharply controlled, though the second act feels noticeably looser in comparison. Ajay Devgn works remarkably well as Vikrant Khanna, carrying the character with a quiet defiance and a brute, effortless charm that still leaves the audience wrestling with moral questions by the end. While films of this kind often slip into glorifying their heroes, “Runway 34” remains grounded in human vulnerability and the desperate instinct to save lives above all else.
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