A grand celebratory wedding day in Georgia, USA, turned into absolute horror and tragedy for a young Indian-origin family.
Dave Fiji, a 25-year-old commercial pilot with Delta Air Lines, was killed alongside the aircraft’s pilot when their private helicopter crashed shortly after takeoff.
His newlywed bride, Jessni, miraculously survived the devastating impact but was left trapped in the wreckage for hours.
The couple had tied the knot earlier that day in a beautiful ceremony attended by hundreds of guests near Dawsonville.
The wedding wrapped up around 9:30 PM, and the newlyweds were scheduled to take a helicopter grand exit to an airport before heading to a downtown Atlanta hotel.
However, by the time the reception ended, weather conditions had severely deteriorated with heavy rain and thick fog blinding the area.
Being an experienced commercial pilot himself, Dave was deeply uneasy about the terrible visibility and explicitly told his father he did not want to fly.
Despite his warnings, the private helicopter pilot reportedly convinced them that flying at a higher altitude would bypass the issue, and the Robinson R66 took off around 10:30 PM.
Minutes later, the aircraft lost control and crashed into a rugged, densely wooded mountainous area southwest of Dawsonville.
The wreckage was so isolated and the terrain so difficult that it took emergency rescue crews nearly five to six hours to cut through the dense vegetation and locate the crash site.
When Jessni finally woke up under the heavy rubble, she found Dave lying lifelessly across her chest.
As a professional nurse, she checked him and immediately realized he had already grown cold and passed away.
While Jessni survived with extensive cuts and deep bruises, she miraculously escaped any major broken bones but remains completely devastated by the loss of her husband.
Dave’s parents, who had originally emigrated to the US from Muvattupuzha in Kerala, are utterly broken by the sudden loss of their “precious, beautiful child.”
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has taken over the crash site and launched a formal investigation into the exact operational causes of the tragedy.
