Air India plane crash: 'Sleepy' pilot blamed

The passenger plane crash was India's first for 10 years

A dozing pilot was to blame for a plane crash in May in southern India which killed 158 people, an official investigation has reportedly found.

According to details of the report leaked to media, the Air India Express plane approached Mangalore at the wrong height and angle.

The Serbian pilot, Zlatko Glusica, was "disorientated" having been asleep for much of the three-hour flight.

There was no immediate comment from the airline.

Data recorders captured the sound of snoring, according to the Hindustan Times.

Glusica is said to have been affected by "sleep inertia" after his nap.

Co-pilot H S Ahluwalia was reportedly heard making repeated warnings to the Serb to abort landing and try again.

Seconds before the plane erupted into a fireball, voice recordings picked up the co-pilot saying: "We don't have runway left".

The Boeing 737 overshot, plunged into a steep gorge and burst into flames. Only eight people survived.

Most of the passengers on the low-cost flight from Dubai to Mangalore were Indian migrant workers returning from the Gulf.

India's Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel told reporters his ministry had received the report on Tuesday and the government would study it before taking any action.

A government official who did not want to be named told the Associated Press news agency that Indian media reports about the findings were accurate.

But the investigation would only be made public once it had been presented to parliament.

Mr Glusica was said in the aftermath of the tragedy to have had 10,000 hours of flying time, including experience of Mangalore's airport.

The civil aviation minister noted at the time that Mangalore had a short landing strip which meant that there was limited space to accommodate planes that overshot.

The airliner missed its landing threshold by about 2,000ft (600m).

In June 2008, Air India denied reports that two of its pilots had been caught napping on the job.

A flight from Dubai allegedly passed its destination of Mumbai because both pilots were fast asleep in the cockpit.

Mumbai air traffic controllers had to use a special buzzer to rouse the pair, but by then the flight was halfway to Goa, according to the Times of India newspaper.

Once awakened, the pilots turned the aircraft around and made a safe landing.

India's air safety record has been good in the past decade, despite a rapid increase in the number of private airlines and air travel in the country.

The tragedy was the country's first major air crash since one in the eastern city of Patna killed at least 50 people in July 2000.

Mangalore's disaster was the deadliest since a mid-air collision in November 1996 between a Saudi airliner and a Kazakh cargo plane near Delhi, in which 349 people died.