Thiruvananthapuram: The body of flight lieutenant S. Achut Dev, 26, who died in a Sukhoi jet crash in Assam recently, was brought home on Friday.
The mortal remains were received by the IAF personnel and has been placed at his house in Pongamoodu, to enable the public to pay homage.
Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan is scheduled to pay his last respects later in the day. The body will then be taken to the Pangode military station around 5 pm and later to his ancestral house in Kozhikode on Saturday. The cremation will be on Sunday. Achut Dev's parents, Sahadevan and Jayasree, are in the capital. He was 26 years old.
The cremation of the other pilot, squadron leader D. Pankaj, was on Thursday.
The Sukhoi jet which crashed on May 23 after going off the radar around 11.10 am after it took off from Tezpur airbase at 10.30 am.
The wreckage of the Sukhoi-30 MKI jet was found on May 26 in a densely forested area in Arunachal Pradesh after a three-day search operation. But the bodies were recovered only after five days, on May 31, due to inclement weather.
"Analysis of the flight data recorder (black box) of the aircraft and certain other articles recovered from the crash site revealed that the pilots could not initiate ejection before the crash," IAF spokesperson Anupam Banerjee said.