The aircraft was in the air for less than 2 minutes.
It struggled to climb, turned sharply left, stalled, and came down on a university campus a short distance from the runway it had just left.
She was 31, and she was reportedly pregnant with her first child.
Her name was Sowmya Sathyanarayana.
She was born on 18th July 1972 in Mulabagilu, a town in Kolar district in Karnataka. Her father, K S Sathyanarayana, was a film producer and writer, so the industry was not a foreign country to her.
She dropped out after her first year of Intermediate in Bangalore, and went into films. A Kannada film figure named Kunigal Vasanth gave her the screen name the country would know her by.
Soundarya.
She debuted in a Kannada film in 1992, and moved into Telugu cinema the following year. Within a few years she was among the biggest actresses in the south.
Ammoru in 1995. Pavitra Bandham in 1996. Anthahpuram in 1998. Raja in 1999. She won 3 Nandi Awards and awards in Karnataka, and worked across Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi.
Most people in north India know her from exactly 1 film. In Sooryavansham in 1999 she played Radha, opposite Amitabh Bachchan. It was her only Hindi film. It is still on television somewhere in this country almost every week.
Then she did something actresses at her level rarely do.
In 2002 she produced a Kannada film called Dweepa. Not starred in. Produced. It won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Kannada.
She married G S Raghu, a software engineer, on 27th April 2003.
Then she entered politics, and that is what put her on the plane.
On the morning of 17th April 2004 she went to the Jakkur airstrip on the edge of Bengaluru to fly to Karimnagar for an election campaign meeting. The aircraft was a single engine Cessna 180. With her were her brother Amarnath, a party worker named Ramesh Kadam, and the pilot, Joy Philips.
They took off at around 11 in the morning.
The aircraft could not gain height. It banked hard to the left, lost control and came down on the campus of the University of Agricultural Sciences. The wreckage caught fire.
All 4 died.
The Prime Minister at the time called it a huge loss. The state government ordered an investigation.
Her last completed film was released after she was gone, and it was one of the biggest hits of her career. Audiences went to watch a woman they knew was already dead.
She was 31 years old, married for less than a year, and had just produced a National Award winning film.
Almost every list of the greatest actresses in Indian cinema still has her name on it.