The crash of the Air India flight IX-1344 from Dubai at Kozhikode Airport on Friday night was the worst of its kind accident Kerala has seen.
But the accident has so many similarities to another crash from a decade ago in the neighboring state of Karnataka.
In 2010, a Boeing 737 aircraft of Air India Express operating an incoming flight to Mangalore had overshot the runway while landing at the 'table-top' airport.
The pilots of that doomed aircraft tried to power-up the plane in an attempt to take-off before running out of tarmac.
Unfortunately, the aircraft plunged into a valley below and exploded killing 158 people on board.
In both cases, the geography of the airport was one of the key factors.
Both Mangaluru and Kozhikode have what is known as tabletop runways.
A tabletop runway is a runway that is located on the top of a plateau or hill with one or both ends adjacent to a steep precipice which drops into a deep gorge.
It is a high-risk maneuver to land a flight on a tabletop runway safely and usually, only highly experienced pilots are tasked with such missions.
Captain Deepak Vasant Sathe, a former Air Force Pilot who flew the ill-fated flight on Friday was a veteran and had made several safe landings in Kozhikode in the past.
But on Friday, the weather was against him. It was raining heavily in Kozhikode for hours and the pilot had informed the Air Traffic Control that he could not see the runway in the first landing attempt.
During the second landing attempt, the flight touched down near a taxiway that is around 1,000 metres from the beginning of the runway.
The Boeing 737-800 aircraft overshot the runway and plunged down 35 feet into a slope before breaking up into two pieces.?
This is almost similar to what happened in Mangaluru in 2010. But the key difference here is in Mangaluru the aviation fuel had leaked out and it got ignited due to the impact.
Luckily this did not happen in Kozhikode and the aviation fuel did not ignite.
Another difference some have pointed out in Mangaluru and Kozhikode is in the first case the pilots had landed on the middle and quickly tried to take off again.
"In Mangalore, pilots had landed the aircraft in the middle of the runway. Then they quickly tried to take-off again, thereby using thrust and power," a senior commander told IANS from Mumbai.
"However, their attempt failed and at the peak power, the aircraft hit antennas at the end of the runway and dived into the valley."
A senior aviation safety professional, who headed the training department of a leading low cost carrier, told IANS, that the speed of impact in Kozhikode incident seems to be slower than that of the one in Mangalore.