AHMEDABAD, India (AP) — An Air India aircraft carrying over 240 passengers en route to London crashed on Thursday in the northwestern city of Ahmedabad, India, according to the airline.
Footage on local television depicted smoke rising from the accident scene in what seemed to be a densely populated area near Ahmedabad’s airport. This city, housing over 5 million residents, witnessed the tragic event.
Firefighters worked to extinguish the flames engulfing the plane wreckage, which was likely filled with fuel shortly after takeoff, alongside a nearby multi-story building. Scattered on the ground were charred bodies.
“The scenes emerging of a London-bound plane carrying many British nationals crashing in the Indian city of Ahmedabad are devastating,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement.
The airline said the Gatwick Airport-bound flight was carrying 242 passengers and crew. Of those, Air India said there were 169 Indians, 53 Britons, seven Portuguese and one Canadian.
Faiz Ahmed Kidwai, the director general of the directorate of civil aviation, told The Associated Press that Air India flight AI 171, a Boeing 787-8, crashed into a residential area called Meghani Nagar five minutes after taking off at 1:38 p.m. local time. He said 244 people were on board and it was not immediately possible to reconcile the discrepancy with Air India’s numbers.
All efforts were being made to ensure medical aid and relief support at the site, India’s Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu posted on X.
The 787 Dreamliner is a widebody, twin-engine plane. This is the first crash ever of a Boeing 787 aircraft, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.
Boeing said it was aware of the reports of the crash and was “working to gather more information.”
The aircraft was introduced in 2009 and more than 1,000 have been delivered to dozens of airlines, according to the flightradar24 website.
Air India’s chairman, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, said at the moment “our primary focus is on supporting all the affected people and their families.”
He said on X that the airline had set up an emergency center and support team for families seeking information about those who were on the flight.
“Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the families and loved ones of all those affected by this devastating event,” he said.
British Cabinet minister Lucy Powell said the government will provide “all the support that it can” to those affected by the crash.
“This is an unfolding story, and it will undoubtedly be causing a huge amount of worry and concern to the many, many families and communities here and those waiting for the arrival of their loved ones,” she told lawmakers in the House of Commons.
“We send our deepest sympathy and thoughts to all those families, and the government will provide all the support that it can with those in India and those in this country as well,” she added.
Britain has very close ties with India. There were nearly 1.9 million people in the country of Indian descent, according to the 2021 U.K. census.
The last major passenger plane crash in India was in 2020 when an Air India Express Boeing-737 skidded off a hilltop runway in southern India, killing 21 people.
The worst air disaster in India was on Nov. 12, 1996, when a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight collided midair with a Kazakhastan Airlines Flight near Charki Dadri in Haryana state, killing all 349 on board the two planes.
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Roy reported from New Delhi. Sheikh Saaliq in Srinagar, India, Pan Pylas and Brian Melley in London and Annika Wolters, David Rising, Adam Schreck and Lorian Belanger in Bangkok contributed to this report.
