Anger and grief in Ahmedabad after India's deadliest crash in decades
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As of Thursday night, an estimated 269 people were confirmed dead, according to senior police official Vishaka Dabral. But students and faculty at the college believe the number of casualties on the ground may be higher, considering how busy the dining hall was at the time of the crash.
Within a minute,
the plane had ascended, leveled off, and then plummeted to the earth, erupting into a ball of fire, according to CCTV footage verified by The Washington Post.
'In a minute, everything has changed,' Vagadaya said from the hospital auditorium, where relatives waited Friday to give their blood to help identify loved ones who died in Thursday's crash, and had within a day morphed from a place of panic to a makeshift gathering site for mourners.
The plane had been carrying 169 Indians, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese nationals, and one Canadian, according to Air India.
The 12 crew members were Indian.
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The pilots of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner - captain Sumeet Sabharwal and first officer Clive Kundar - had issued a 'Mayday' distress call shortly after takeoff on Thursday, India's civil aviation regulatory authority said in a statement provided via WhatsApp. There was no further communication from the cockpit, it said. Air India did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Aviation experts caution that it is too early to determine the cause. India's civil aviation minister tweeted on Friday evening that investigators had retrieved the plane's flight data recorder, one of two 'black box' recorders that airlines typically have. 'This marks an important step forward in the investigation,' Ram Mohan Naidu said.
Mohan Ranganathan, a former Boeing 737 instructor pilot, said the CCTV footage shows the aircraft's nose rising again during descent, a possible indication that the pilot stalled while attempting to regain lift. He said preliminary reports can be issued after two weeks of finding the flight data recorder, but a final report can take time.
Other analysts pointed to abnormal takeoff configurations. Jeff Guzzetti, a former Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigator, said the videos show the landing gear remained down and the flaps unelevated.
'It happened during the daytime. The visibility was good. So what went wrong?' wondered Jitender Bhargava, a former Air India executive director and author of 'The Descent of Air India,'
a book about the financial downfall of the airline.
Rahul Bhatia, a medical student at the medical college, was frantic on Friday morning, switching between phone calls and responding to WhatsApp groups, trying to help his classmates find the missing.
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He was still in shock from the stories coming in. He heard that a friend's wife, seven months pregnant, was in the dormitory when a plane ripped through the ceiling and wall.
Her unborn child was seen outside her body, Bhatia said he heard - a report that The Post could not independently verify. 'I'll remember this for the rest of my life.'
Major aviation disasters are rare in India, though Air India, the country's former national carrier, has been involved in several deadly incidents.
In 2020, a flight operated by Air India Express, a subsidiary of Air India, skidded off a runway during a heavy downpour in southern India and broke into pieces, killing 21 who had been on board. In 2010, 158 people died in Mangalore, western India, when an Air India Express plane overshot the runway while landing and crashed down the side of a hill. In 1978, all 213 people aboard Air India Flight 855 perished after the plane fell into the Arabian Sea off the coast of Mumbai shortly after takeoff.
There has been 'no accountability,' Ranganathan said.
Since its privatization in 2022, Air India - now owned by the Tata Group - has faced a string of regulatory setbacks. In March this year, Air India fired a simulator trainer pilot after a whistleblower alleged that the pilot had failed to properly discharge his duties and misrepresented the number of hours for which simulator training was carried out.
Two months before the whistleblower incident, India's civil aviation regulator fined the airline 3,000,000 rupees (about $35,000) after it allowed a pilot to operate a flight without completing the mandatory takeoffs and landings. In March 2024, the airline was found in violation of flight duty time limitations - rules that help prevent pilot fatigue - and fined 8,000,000 rupees (about $93,000).
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Bhargava said none of the violations would have led to safety hazards that 'translate into this tragedy.'
'But, no doubt,' he said, 'at the end of the day, the accountability is with the airline.'
Thursday's crash was the first involving Boeing's 787, a fuel-efficient jet introduced by the company in 2009 and dubbed the Dreamliner. The jet that crashed was delivered to Air India in early 2014; it had taken off and landed more than 8,000 times, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.
Analysts said the inquiry is likely to focus on the actions of the pilots, the airline, maintenance of the jet, and Boeing - which has struggled for years to fully recover from two air disasters both involving a smaller jet, the 737 Max, in 2018 and 2019. Those crashes,
which were linked to a design flaw, killed a combined 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
But Bhargava said: 'I will not judge by previous controversies. I will judge by the safety track record of the Dreamliner.' Until Thursday, more than 1,100 Dreamliners in service globally had carried 1 billion passengers with no fatal crashes, according to Boeing.
In a news conference on Thursday, US Transportion Secretary Sean P. Duffy said the NTSB and FAA were deploying investigators to assist India in its investigation of the deadly plane crash.
Duffy added that it was still very early in the investigation, but promised to take action if there were safety failures. 'If there are initial factors of concern in regards to safety, we will be made aware and we will take action. When one of these planes go down, we take it very seriously,' he said.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday visited the crash site, touring the wreckage and speaking with Viswash Kumar Ramesh, the sole survivor of the 242 people aboard the flight. News outlet ANI released an image
of Modi looking
up at the aircraft's mangled tail jutting out of the college's wall. The prime minister did not speak to reporters.
Back at the Civil Hospital, still bedridden from his injuries, Ramesh spoke briefly to local media.
He told the broadcaster Doordarshan that he was on the side of the plane that crashed into the ground floor of the hospital. 'When the door broke, I saw that there was some space for me to get out,' he said, his voice quivering. 'I really don't know how I survived.'
Nearby, Hina Kundani trembled with rage inside the crowded hospital auditorium, waiting to provide a DNA sample. Three of her relatives had been aboard the flight.
'This is not the time for a photo session,' the 45-year-old shouted at Harsh Sanghavi, the home affairs minister of Gujarat, who was visiting the hospital at the time. Sanghavi left the auditorium shortly after a Post reporter approached him for comment, and his secretary did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
'We're in trauma,' she told The Post, 'and ministers are taking photos.'
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