AHMEDABAD: India’s deadliest air crash involving a single plane, with at least 245 casualties onboard and on the ground, unravelled in 30 seconds of horrific footage on Thursday as an 11-year-old Air India 787-8 Dreamliner taking off from Ahmedabad for London with 242 passengers and crew flatlined after climbing barely 650ft and crashed into a medical college campus before bursting into flames.Ex-Gujarat CM Vijay Rupani was among the passengers killed in the disaster, while at least four confirmed deaths were reported on the campus of B J Medical College and Civil Hospital, around 3km from the end of runway from which the flight had taken off. A lone passenger – identified as Indian-born British national Viswashkumar Ramesh, 40, seated in 11A – walked out of the burning plane after miraculously surviving the crash.
Sources said the toll could rise as 290-odd body bags were used. Three doctors and a pregnant woman, wife of a doctor at the hospital in Meghaninagar, were killed inside the quarters and mess into which the aircraft crashed. A fourth doctor is reported missing. Around 21 resident doctors on the college campus suffered burns and fractures.The flight’s passenger list had 169 Indians, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese and a Canadian. Rupani was travelling to London to be with his wife and daughter. Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, who had logged 8,200 hours of flying, was in the cockpit with First Officer Clive Kunder. The 10-member cabin crew included two young women from conflict-ridden Manipur.Initial details suggest the aircraft may have experienced technical difficulties shortly after take-off, with a “Mayday” call from the cockpit to Ahmedabad ATC before communication snapped. Docs left mess after lunch, plane crashed minutes later AI 171, which was scheduled to depart from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel airport’s Terminal 2 at 1.10 pm, took off at 1.39 pm after a full-length run on the 3,505-metre Runway No. 23. What was to be an estimated 9-hour, 22-minute journey to Gatwick airport ended when the Dreamliner – the first one to crash since Boeing launched the 787-8 – looped into Atulyam-4, the residential quarters of super-specialist resident doctors, and a mess for UG and PG students at one of Gujarat’s top medical colleges.Initial details suggest the aircraft may have experienced technical difficulties shortly after take-off, with a “Mayday” call from the cockpit to Ahmedabad ATC before communication snapped. Operations at the airport were suspended for over two hours.As rescuers scoured the plane’s wreckage, spread across half a kilometre, it became clear that survivors would be hard to find. While the fuselage rested on residential quarters, the tail hung from the damaged mess building where doctors had assembled for lunch. Teams from NDRF, IAF, BSF and NSG were part of salvage operations along with 50-odd ambulances and 65 fire engines.Dr Tushar Patel, an internal medicine specialist, said the death toll in the mess would have been much higher had the plane crashed into the building moments earlier. Hundreds of doctors had left the building by then after having lunch.The aircraft’s black box – the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder – holds the key to finding out how the disaster occurred, aviation officials said.This is India’s biggest civil aviation disaster since 2020, when an Air India Express flight skidded off a wet runway while landing at Kozhikode in Kerala and split into two. Of the 190 people on board, 21, including the two pilots, died. The 1996 Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision between two Saudia and Kazakhstan Airlines flights caused the highest casualties – 349 – in an air crash in India. On Oct 19, 1988, an Indian Airlines plane crashed in its final approach to Ahmedabad airport, killing 130 people.“The tragedy in Ahmedabad has stunned and saddened us. It is heartbreaking beyond words,” PM Narendra Modi wrote on X after news of the AI 171 crash sent ripples of shock coursing through the world. Britain’s King Charles III said he and his wife, Queen Camilla, were “desperately shocked by the terrible events in Ahmedabad this morning”. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the tragedy “devastating”.Aircraft maker Boeing said in a statement that it was in contact with Air India and ready to offer any support to the Tata-owned airline.
