Airlift:- The True Story

Airlift, the movie is completely based on a real life story of a businessman in Kuwait, named Mathunny Mathews. Popularly known as 'Toyota Sunny', he was said to be the inspiration behind Akshay Kumar's character in the hit Bollywood film 'Airlift'.

Manthunny Mathews was an Indian, a resident in Kuwait and was one of the people credited with the safe evacuation. It was by his help due to which the airlift of a huge number of Indians was carried out from 13 August to 11 October 1990 after the Invasion of Kuwait.

The 1990 evacuation of around 1,76,000 Indian nationals from Kuwait/Iraq through Jordan is a case study on the government’s ability to respond to an emergency. The people were evacuated by the help of civil airlines. The operation was carried out before the Persian Gulf War in 1990 to evacuate Indian expatriates from Kuwait. Following this operation, this whole scenario was recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records, under the category of most people evacuated by a civil airliner.

Initial efforts were made by the Indian Government, to evacuate nationals by military aircraft. But due to certain issues like air-space clearances Military Aircrafts were replaced by Civilians aircraft. India had initially requested to evacuate the people from Iraq through Air India, but US denied for the same because according to the rules and regulations, India was required to use planes supplied to them under the UN banner. Many complications arose because the number of the civilians was extremely large, moreover everyone did not have proper documentation on them.

This event was the basis for the 2016 film Airlift starring Akshay Kumar, who played the character inspired by the works of Mathunny Mathews. However, some of the facts were changed in the movie; for example, downplaying the efforts put by the Indian Government. Other than this all the facts as well as the story was completely the same as what had happened during the evacuation.