‘Most of the passengers were still strapped to their seats': First responders recount scenes of Ahmedabad plane crash horror

'Almost 70% of the passengers were found in their seats, most of them had their seatbelts on…'
This was how a first responder, who rushed to the site of the Air India plane crash near Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport, described the horrific scene that he witnessed on Thursday afternoon.
Another first responder said that a few passengers were found near the emergency doors of the aircraft.
It was one of these emergency doors through which 39-year-old Vishwas Kumar, a passenger who survived the crash, is said to have exited the burning aircraft.
When the fire department and police control room received the first messages of the crash around 1.38 pm, many officers said that they thought the plane had been involved in an accident on the airport premises, possibly due to an aborted take-off or landing attempt.
But as they reached the site of the crash, a cluster of hostel buildings housing students of a medical college, the scale of the disaster dawned upon them.
The first set of people to reach the spot was the airport's own fire department, which used foam to control the blaze enveloping the aircraft. Soon, 130 personnel of the Ahmedabad Fire and Emergency Services (AFES) along with the City Police reached the site.
The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) pressed six teams, three each from Gandhinagar and Vadodara, into service. Meanwhile, the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) at the airport as well as the Rapid Action Force (RAF) also arrived at the spot. According to an Army spokesperson, Relief and Rescue columns were dispatched from the Ahmedabad Cantonment of the Southern Command.
The debris of the aircraft was spread over an area spanning 500 metres. First responders, though, said that some pieces were also found 900 metres away.
Three of the four buildings that the plane hit were on fire after the right side of the aircraft sheared through them. The tail end of the aircraft was found embedded in the top floor of the first building, where the medical students were having lunch in the canteen.
Firefighters told The Indian Express that the black box had been retrieved from this spot using cranes and other heavy moving equipment.
Eyewitnesses, including The Indian Express staff, spotted the left wing of the aircraft, which had also got detached, lying a few metres away from the rest of the plane that had split into several sections. More than 40-50 vehicles on the ground are also said to have been destroyed in the crash.
Another official said, 'It appears that the landing gear broke off first, then the tail end and then the rest of the aircraft…'
Several hundred litres of highly flammable Aviation Gasoline was sprayed across the crash site, leading to a number of fires, burning at more than 700 degrees Celsius. The water that had pooled around the site during the 45-minute firefighting operations was so hot that, according to eyewitnesses, people without protective gear were left scalded.
Most of the passengers had third-degree burns and some of the bodies retrieved from the aircraft were so charred that a number of first responders that The Indian Express reached out to said they could not put in words what they witnessed at the site of the tragedy.
Aircraft crash investigators reached the site within four hours of the incident. Police are likely to preserve the crash site for about two days to let the forensic experts do their job. Police personnel would be deployed around the perimeter to ensure no trespassers.
Just a couple of kilometres away, the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital witnessed heart-rending scenes as the family members, still in shock, gave their blood samples for DNA profiling so that the remains of their loved ones could be accurately identified. This process is likely to take 72 hours, prolonging the pain of the grieving families sitting around the post mortem room as hospital staff remove fresh white linen from their plastic packets to cover the bodies flowing into the hospital. It is going to be a long night for them.

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