A Takeoff, Plane Crash, Body Charred Beyond Recognition: How Telugu Actress Soundarya Died In 2004

It was April 17, 2004. Telugu celebrity Soundarya had simply boarded a single-engine Cessna 180 from the Jakkur airstrip close to Bengaluru in Karnataka. Soundarya, the belle of Telugu cinema and a physician, had simply joined the BJP. She was on her strategy to Karimnagar in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh to marketing campaign for the BJP. It was 11 am.

5 minutes later, the Cessna burst right into a ball of flames and crashed. Soundarya, and her fellow passengers on that ill-fated flight, by no means made it out. They had been all charred to dying.

Sowmya Sathyanarayana, popularly generally known as Soundarya, was solely 32 when she died. Soundarya primarily labored in Telugu movies other than Kannada, Tamil, Hindi and Malayalam cinema. She loved widespread fame and recognition after sharing display area with Amitabh Bachchan within the 1999 Hindi drama Sooryavansham.

On the time of her dying, Soundarya was pregnant. She was travelling to Karimnagar together with her brother Amarnath, BJP occasion employee Ramesh Kadam, and pilot Pleasure Philips, none of whom made it out alive. In truth, there was no identification of the our bodies attainable since they had been all burnt past recognition.

Shortly after takeoff, the Cessna 180 plane crashed on the campus of the Gandhi Krishi Vigyan Kendra of the College of Agricultural Sciences, close to Bengaluru.

Here is a lowdown on what occurred on April 17, 2004

• The plane, a Cessna 180, took off from the Jakkur airstrip at 11.05 am.
• Soundarya, pregnant at the moment, was travelling together with her brother, Amarnath, BJP occasion employee Ramesh Kadam, and pilot Pleasure Philips to Karimnagar, then Andhra Pradesh.
• She was on her strategy to Andhra Pradesh to marketing campaign for the Bharatiya Janata Occasion (BJP) for the final elections.
• The plane turned west earlier than crashing on the campus of the Gandhi Krishi Vigyan Kendra of the College of Agricultural Sciences. 
• It had reached a top of 150 ft (46 m), and, earlier than reaching the required price of climb pace, took a steep left flip, which led to a stall. 
• It caught fireplace a couple of minutes into takeoff and crashed into the bottom nostril down.
• BN Ganapathi, one of many two individuals engaged on the experimental fields of the college, who rushed to the plane to save lots of the passengers, stated the airplane wobbled earlier than the crash.
• SM Krishna, the then Karnataka Chief Minister, and Arun Jaitley, the Union Commerce Minister after which BJP state-in-charge, rushed to Jakkur after the crash. The BJP metropolis unit additionally known as off all its public programmes for the day.
• The then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, additionally expressed his sorrow at Soundarya’s premature dying.

Soundarya, a significant Telugu celebrity, was a crowdpuller for the BJP within the South. She had married a software program govt Sridhar in 2003, months earlier than her dying.

Soundarya’s death is in headlines now, after 20 years, as a police grievance has been filed in Andhra Pradesh’s Khammam district. The complainant Chittimallu has alleged that Soundarya’s dying was not unintended, however a homicide linked to a property dispute with Telugu actor Mohan Babu.