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History Headline: 37 years earlier, another air crash in Ahmedabad
Ushaben Patel had just finished helping her son Mileen, 8, with his homework before school on October 19, 1988, when the driver she had sent to Ahmedabad airport to pick up her husband returned to their Naranpura residence without him. Sharadbhai Patel, 35, a finance director at Rexroth, a hydraulic and electrical systems firm, was flying back a day before their elder son Jaysheel's birthday.
'As soon as the driver told me that my husband's plane had crashed, I left for the airport. At the site, I saw bodies on fire. I said a quick prayer for them before fainting,' Ushaben, 75, who lives in Canada now, tells The Indian Express over telephone.
At 6.53 am on October 19, 1988, an Indian Airlines flight (a Boeing-737) from Bombay to Ahmedabad with 135 passengers, including six crew members, crashed into a paddy field around 2.5 km from runway 23 of Ahmedabad's Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport. While 130 died on impact, three succumbed to their injuries during treatment. Two men who survived the crash sustained grievous injuries.
On June 12 this year — nearly 37 years later — Air India's Boeing-787 Dreamliner departed from runway 23 of the airport with 242 passengers, including 12 crew members, for London. Minutes later, the plane went down, its tail striking the first-floor mess at B J Medical College and Hospital, located a kilometre from the airport. While 241 persons onboard and several others on the ground were killed, one passenger survived the crash.
A report dated October 20, 1988, in The Indian Express states that the Boeing, 'acquired in 1971…apparently lost height before landing and went shearing through branches of babul trees, hit a neem tree and also snapped a high tension power line before crashing'.
Initially, five persons had survived the 1988 crash — Vinod Tripathi, Parag Vasavada, Jaikrishna Kaushik Rav, Ashok Agarwal and Rajiv. News reports say that these survivors, seated in the tail portion of the plane, were 'thrown out' after the aircraft broke into three parts on impact.
At 13, Jaikrishna was the youngest survivor, but he lost his parents and brother in the crash. Residents of Sabarkantha district's Idar, the family had come to Gujarat nearly a decade after shifting to Zambia.
In 1988, Dr M F Shaikh, then 30, was an assistant professor in the General Surgery and Plastic Surgery Department of BJ Medical College, which is affiliated with and located on the Civil Hospital campus.
'Jaikrishna had fractured his right femur (the strongest bone in the human body) and had burn injuries. A week after his treatment at the hospital, he was airlifted to Mumbai's Hinduja Hospital. However, he succumbed to his injuries within two days,' says Dr Shaikh, who retired as the Head of the Plastic Surgery Department.
Besides Jaikrishna, Parag Vasavada and Rajiv too died during the course of treatment. Of the two survivors, Tripathi, then Gujarat Vidyapith Registrar, passed away in 2003, while Agrawal, a textile businessman, died in March 2020.
The first to treat the Registrar, Dr Shaikh says Tripathi 'ran from the blazing plane despite burns in both legs'. Tripathi, who retired as Vice-Chancellor, was carrying 170 degrees to get them signed by then Chancellor Morarji Desai. The Vidyapith reissued these degrees.
Agarwal's family, which has moved to another area in Ahmedabad, declined requests by The Indian Express to talk about the incident. One of his old neighbours says, 'He lost his wife Abha, 22, and their daughter Ruhi, 11 months, in the crash. He never recovered from the loss of his family.'
Dr Drupad Chhatrapati, 92, then medical superintendent at the Civil Hospital, recalls, 'Within 48 hours of the post-mortem, we emptied out a ward at the hospital. The bodies, covered in white sheets, were lined up there for identification. Since there was no DNA testing then, families were asked to identify the remains.'
According to reports, bodies, luggage and plane debris were found strewn over a radius of half a kilometre near the Kotarpur Water Works, under construction then. Pinakin Dikshit, then Deputy Commissioner, Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, says, 'It was a foggy morning. Construction lights were on at the water works compound. The pilot could have mistaken those for landing lights.'
Today, a memorial — a concrete airplane on a 10×10 platform — stands at the crash site, located inside the compound. Since 1990, victims' families have been visiting the site annually on October 19 to pay their respects. A rusted board near the memorial, with the words 'Smriti Van' painted in white, leads to a 'mini forest', where the families had planted 133 saplings in 1991.
Anil Pathak, 75, a reporter who had done stories on the crash, recalls, 'Among the belongings recovered was a potli (cloth bundle) of gold. I remember the parents of a Mumbai-based cabin crew member wandering around the site in search of their daughter for months. They were convinced that she had survived the crash.'
The crash posed many challenges, says ex-Chief Secretary P K Laheri, then Principal Secretary to CM Amarsinh Chaudhary. 'There were no mobile phones then. The police control room called me 20 minutes after the crash. Limited resources meant we had to call the fire brigade from Vadodara (around 100 km away). There were no rescue teams then. All rescue work was undertaken by the fire department,' he says.
US resident Pankesh Patel, 64, lost his brother Rakesh and sister-in-law Bhavnaben, both 24, in the crash. He says, 'The June 12 crash revived memories of the 1988 incident— the shock and how my parents were left devastated. Like us, these families too will go through the same trauma.'
Though the authorities had announced a compensation of Rs 2 lakh per victim of the 1988 crash, their families have been fighting a legal battle for 'fair' compensation based on a victim's age and income .
The writer is an Assistant Editor, The Indian Express
