Mother Sheela Kumari at their Patna home. (Above) File picture of Sansrity Sinha. Picture by Deepak Kumar

New Delhi/Patna, Oct. 23: Small-town girl Sansrity Sinha’s hopes of making it big in the booming aviation sector came to a gory end on the Delhi airport tarmac last night, days before she was to be engaged.

The 25-year-old aeronautical engineer, found dead in the technical area with her head crushed, was probably knocked down by a vehicle in an increasingly congested airport, sources privy to the post-mortem said.

One theory floated yesterday had speculated that the Patna girl, who worked for the maintenance wing of Deccan (formerly Air Deccan), was killed by a plane’s jet stream near the airline’s hangar.

This morning’s post-mortem suggested a hit-and-run. “She died instantly as her head was crushed. What kind of vehicle knocked her down, and whether she was hit from the front or behind, will only be revealed later,” a source close to the investigation said.

“Had we known before, we would have married her off without giving her the higher education that landed her this elite job,” Sansrity’s mother Sheela Kumari Ambastha was inconsolable at the family’s home in Patna.

Sheela, principal of B.N. Collegiate School, and husband Arun Kumar Sinha, professor of psychology at a local college, had been getting their house painted for their youngest daughter’s wedding.

They would have left for Delhi in a couple of days for her engagement with a Bangalore-based Wipro engineer.

At Delhi airport, rumours swirled the whole day around the mystery death in the high-security area, some claiming Sansrity might have been run over by an aircraft and some speculating about murder and a love angle.

Deccan officials, conducting their own inquiry, said it was “a clear case of accident”.

“Vehicles at the airport must stick to a speed limit of 20km. We have lost our employee as people drive at 40km. The airport authorities are responsible,” said Taufiq Mohammed, the airline’s chief security officer.

The growing number of airlines using it has left the Delhi airport tarmac a crowded and chaotic place, despite the management running training and refresher programmes and carrying out random checks.

A year ago, at least seven people suffered minor injuries when an empty Air Sahara shuttle coach allegedly collided with another ferrying passengers of a Delhi-bound Kingfisher flight.

Sansrity, whose body was found around 9.30pm, was attending to some technical work near the hangar. No outside vehicles are allowed in the area, so an airport or airline vehicle — luggage truck, jeep, etc — would have been involved if it was a hit-and-run.

A Deccan statement said: “Sinha was in full compliance of all requisite safety requirements and was wearing a jacket.”

The young woman, a former student of Patna’s St Joseph Convent, had graduated from the Indian Institute of Aeronautics in her hometown. Teachers and friends described her as a “brilliant student full of energy and vigour”.

She took up the Deccan job a year ago. Her brother Tusar is a Bajaj Allianz executive and sister Pallavi an Oracle employee in Bangalore, married to an ICICI Bank official.