Ten people were on the Super King aircraft that was flying to Ranchi in Jharkhand (Associated Press photo)
38-year-old Captain Rajesh Shivrain would have attended the school function of his young daughter on Tuesday had he not been co-piloting the Border Security Force aircraft that crashed after a short take-off in New Delhi.
Captain Shivrain, a fitness and sports enthusiast, was the only officer of the border guarding force Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) working in the Border Security Force air wing and was reputed for having some deft hands at the flying machines, including on the Superking B-200 that he and his pilot colleague Deputy Commandant Bhagwati Prasad Bhatt was commandeering.
The young officer's two little children Pradyumn and Pari were in school when their father was flying the BSF sortie to Ranchi carrying a team of six technicians and two others.
"He was supposed to come back and go for his five-year-old daughter's school function in the evening. It is really tragic and the twist of fate that he met with the air accident," a senior official said.
They said as soon as the news of the air crash came in, the Sashastra Seema Bal rushed some of its men to fetch the children from school and look after the family.
"He went down in the Dwarka area, kilometres away from where he lived," the official said, adding that Captain Shivrain lived in Sector-4 of Dwarka locality of the national capital.
SSB Director General BD Sharma described Captain Shivrain as a "good officer, brave, sensitive and physically very fit."
"It's a sad day for us to have lost a very good officer," Mr Sharma said.
Captain Shivrain, who joined SSB in 2002 as an officer, was flying the plane with his batch-mate Deputy Commandant Bhatt, and, coincidentally both were born in 1977.
A resident of Bhiwani, Captain Shivrain joined the BSF air wing in the pilot rank in 2009 and was soon to be inducted permanently in this special unit of the Union Home Ministry.
Senior officials of central police forces will pay their last respects to their fallen colleagues at the Safdarjung airport on Wednesday after which the mortal remains of Captain Shivrain will be brought to the SSB headquarters in New Delhi and subsequently a ceremonial guard will take his body in a truck to his village in Haryana.