Captain Rustom Palia – Air India Flight AI-101

    How Captain Rustom Palia and co-pilot Captain S. R. Alphonse landed Air India Flight AI-101 safely after a total ILS and auto-throttle failure — and what their self-confidence under pressure teaches every leader.

    Captain Rustom Palia – Air India Flight AI-101

    Captain Rustom Palia – Air India Flight AI-101

    On a September night in 2018, Air India Flight AI-101 lost the instruments that guide a Boeing 777 onto a runway — all of them, at once, 370 lives on board. What Captain Rustom Palia did next, with his co-pilot Captain S. R. Alphonse beside him, is one of the clearest real-world pictures of self-confidence I have ever used in a training room. This is that story, in full, and the leadership lesson inside it.

    In short

    Where this sits on your Winning Kite

    Self-Confidence is the third trait on the Emotional Intelligence — EQ, the left side — panel of the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework). On its own, self-confidence lifts nothing. Paired with RQ (how you carry your team with you) and PQ (how you execute under pressure), it becomes the difference between a leader who freezes when the plan falls apart and a leader who improvises a new plan and holds the room. Captain Palia's cockpit that night is the sharpest version of this I know.

    The Flight: Delhi to New York, 14 Hours In

    In September 2018, Captain Rustom Palia took command of Air India Flight AI-101, a Boeing 777 flying the long haul from Delhi to New York — a journey of more than 14 hours across continents. Long-haul flights like this one usually pass without drama: cruise, meal service, a change of shift in the cockpit, descent, landing. That night, high above 37,000 feet, somewhere over the final stretch of the journey, the aircraft ran into a sequence of serious technical failures that no pilot wants to see stack up together.

    Everything That Went Wrong, One System at a Time

    First, the aircraft's Instrument Landing System — ILS — failed completely. The ILS is what guides a pilot precisely onto the runway centreline and glide path in low visibility or at night; losing it forces the crew to line up the aircraft almost entirely by eye and by whatever backup aids remain. Then the auto-throttle stopped working. Pilots lean on auto-throttle to hold a steady airspeed automatically, especially during the busiest phase of flight — the approach and landing — when their hands and attention are already stretched across dozens of other tasks. Without it, every adjustment to speed had to be made manually, continuously, by feel.

    As the 777 neared Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, the situation was as serious as it gets in civil aviation: a wide-body aircraft, 370 passengers, 15 crew, and two of the most important systems on the flight deck no longer working. This is exactly the kind of moment where a pilot's inner state — not just their technical skill — decides the outcome.

    The Decision in the Cockpit

    Inside the cockpit, Captain Palia stayed calm. He did not wait for someone else to hand him a solution, and he did not let the cascading failures rattle his judgment. Drawing on years of flying experience, he made a bold, deliberate call: attempt a "no ILS, no auto-throttle" landing — a manual approach that demands total focus, precise hand-flying and complete trust in one's own training. There was no autopilot shortcut left to lean on. Every metre of that final approach would be flown by his own hands and his own judgment.

    This is self-confidence in its purest working form. Not bravado, not recklessness — a grounded, tested belief that "I have trained for exactly this, and I can do this." Psychologists call this quality self-efficacy: a positive, realistic judgment of one's own ability to handle a specific challenge. It is not arrogance, because arrogance ignores reality. Self-efficacy is built on it.

    A Trusting Co-Pilot

    Captain Palia was not alone in that cockpit, and this is the part of the story that turns a personal trait into a leadership lesson. His co-pilot, Captain S. R. Alphonse, shared the same quiet self-confidence. Instead of spiralling into what-ifs about everything that could still go wrong, he trusted the training both of them had gone through and supported the captain's plan without hesitation. Both men understood the risk fully — they were not naive about it — yet their steady, shared composure held the entire situation together. One confident pilot flying the aircraft is good. Two composed professionals, aligned and trusting each other's judgment under pressure, is what actually gets 385 people home.

    In the Cabin

    Behind the cockpit door, passengers could sense that something was not quite right — the small cues that travellers pick up on even without an announcement. Some were visibly nervous. The cabin crew reassured them as best they could, and Captain Palia made calm, measured announcements, asking everyone to remain seated and trust the process. That calm voice over the intercom was itself an extension of his self-confidence — the same inner steadiness that was flying the aircraft was also managing 370 anxious people who had no way to help and every reason to be afraid.

    The Landing

    With no electronic aids left to guide the aircraft in, the pilots relied entirely on manual flying skill — watching altitude, airspeed and runway alignment with total concentration. Every second counted. A small slip in speed or angle at that stage of an approach can turn into a hard landing or worse. But because of Captain Palia and Captain Alphonse's unwavering self-confidence and their genuine belief in their own trained abilities, they brought the Boeing 777 down safely at Newark. All 370 passengers and 15 crew members walked off the aircraft grateful, shaken, and relieved — but safe.

    Why This Story Belongs in Every Leadership Room

    I use Captain Palia's landing in training rooms because it strips self-confidence down to what it actually is: not a personality trait some people are lucky to be born with, but a capability built through preparation and drawn on precisely when the plan collapses. Every pilot trains for engine failures, system failures, and manual approaches in the simulator, over and over, long before they ever need it in real life. When AI-101's ILS and auto-throttle both failed at once, Captain Palia was not improvising from nothing — he was drawing on a deep reserve of rehearsed competence and trusting it completely, in real time, with no room to hesitate.

    That is the same self-confidence I ask managers and team leaders to build for their own "no ILS" moments — the client call that goes sideways, the system that crashes mid-presentation, the numbers that come in wrong on the day of the board meeting. The skill is not staying calm because nothing is wrong. It is staying calm, and decisive, because you trust what you have prepared for.

    Self-Confidence Cuts Both Ways

    I have also watched the other side of this trait up close. Early in my career, an operations manager on my team — let's call him by the name I use in the book, Shrinath — had exactly the raw ingredient: he was hardworking, and his self-confidence was real. But it went unchecked. He believed his own ideas were always right, took on tasks beyond what he was ready for, and rarely listened to his teammates. Slowly, his team started feeling unheard. Small disagreements built into real friction. When promotions came up, Shrinath was passed over — not because he lacked ability, but because his confidence had curdled into an inability to accept feedback. He left the company, and the same pattern followed him to his next two jobs, because the problem was never the company. It was the unchecked confidence itself.

    Set that beside Captain Palia. Both men were confident. Only one of them paired that confidence with humility, discipline, and total respect for his co-pilot's judgment. That pairing — confidence anchored to reality, and open to another person's input even in a crisis — is what the EQ side of the Winning Kite is actually asking of you. Self-confidence without self-awareness is a landing without an ILS in a different, much more dangerous sense.

    Where I See This at Work in Corporate India

    The same pattern from AI-101 shows up constantly in Indian workplaces, just with lower stakes and no runway. An auditor under pressure from a client's senior manager to overlook a discrepancy needs the same core trait Captain Palia needed: trust in your own judgment strong enough to hold the line even when someone more senior is pushing you to fold. A salesperson walking into a high-stakes pitch needs it to speak with conviction instead of hedging every sentence. A young trainer asked to step into a colleague's shoes overnight — I have watched this exact scene play out in a software training centre I know well, where one trainer quit mid-batch in a huff and another, Nikita, stepped up with calm self-belief and simply said, "I can handle this." The centre's reputation survived because one person trusted her own competence when everyone else hesitated.

    Psychologist Daniel Goleman's work on emotional intelligence makes a similar point: self-confidence is one of the clearest external signals of internal emotional competence, because it shows up precisely when the stakes are highest and the easy path is to defer or freeze. Captain Palia never froze.

    Building This in Your Own Team

    You cannot manufacture self-confidence with a slogan. You build it the way an airline builds it in its pilots — through repeated exposure to controlled pressure, honest debriefs, and enough small wins that belief in one's own ability becomes evidence-based rather than wishful. As a leader, your job is threefold: give your people the training reps before the real crisis arrives, give them honest feedback so their confidence stays anchored to reality and not ego, and — like Captain Alphonse did in that cockpit — back their judgment openly when they've earned it, instead of quietly hedging your support in front of the team.

    This is precisely the kind of behavioural training I run inside organisations through our Signature Programs and the wider corporate training topics we cover — building the EQ, RQ and PQ that together lift a team's kite, rather than treating confidence as something people either have or don't.

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    Avinash Chate

    TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · Author of Stars at India Inc.

    Avinash has trained the Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership, emotional intelligence and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What happened on Air India Flight AI-101 in 2018?

    In September 2018, Air India's Boeing 777 flight AI-101 from Delhi to New York suffered a total failure of its Instrument Landing System (ILS) and its auto-throttle system while approaching Newark Liberty International Airport. Captain Rustom Palia, with co-pilot Captain S. R. Alphonse, executed a manual, no-ILS, no-auto-throttle landing and brought all 370 passengers and 15 crew members down safely.

    Why is Captain Palia's landing an example of self-confidence?

    With every electronic landing aid gone, Captain Palia had to trust his own judgment, training and hand-flying skill rather than the aircraft's systems. That composed, decisive belief in his own ability — not recklessness, but grounded self-efficacy — is what allowed him to fly a precise visual approach under extreme pressure instead of freezing or second-guessing himself.

    Where does self-confidence sit on the Winning Kite framework?

    Self-confidence is Trait #3 on the Emotional Intelligence (EQ) side — the left panel — of the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework). It works alongside Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation and the other EQ traits, and only becomes "Success" at the top of the kite when it is balanced by RQ (Relationship Intelligence) and PQ (Productivity).

    Is self-confidence something you are born with, or can it be built?

    Psychologists call it self-efficacy — a learned, positive judgment of your own ability to handle a situation. It is built through preparation, repetition and training, not luck. Pilots build it through thousands of hours of simulator drills; corporate professionals build it the same way, through deliberate practice and honest feedback, which is exactly what structured leadership training aims to accelerate.

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