The pilot of the Air India crash urgently alerted that the plane was ‘losing power’ mere moments before colliding with a structure, resulting in at least 260 fatalities.
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, en route to London, nosedived into a bustling suburb moments after departing from Ahmedabad Airport earlier today, with the tragedy likely leaving only one survivor.
Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, a veteran with 8,200 flight hours, made a desperate call, saying, ‘Mayday…no thrust, losing power, unable to lift’ just before the aircraft crash-landed into a residential building.
Miracle British survivor Vishwash Kumar Ramesh remembers ‘a loud noise…then the plane crashed’.
The Boeing was not much more than 400ft above ground when the two experienced pilots apparently onboard lost power in both engines. They then had 17 agonising seconds to wrestle with the controls before their state-of-the-art plane smashed into a medical college packed with doctors, sending a fireball soaring into the sky.
Distressing video footage shows the jet’s fateful last moments as it rapidly lost altitude and speed, which would have filled the cockpit with a cacophony of terrifying alarms.
Captain Sabharwal and Clive Kundar, his co-pilot with 1,100 hours of experience, issued a desperate mayday call.
The footage appears to show them hopelessly trying to nudge up the nose of their sinking aircraft moments before the devastating impact.
Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, who had 8,200 hours of flying experience, desperately cried ‘Mayday…no thrust, losing power, unable to lift’ before the aircraft went down and hit a residential property
Officer Clive Kunder, from Mumbai, was also on the doomed Air India flight that crashed moments after take-off
Passangers’ luggage lies at the crash site after the plane, bound for London’s Gatwick Airport, crashed during take-off from Ahmedabad Airport
A video posted to social media appeared to show the plane descending in a controlled manner with a high nose angle and landing gear deployed
The plane momentarily disappeared from view behind trees and buildings before a massive fireball erupted on the horizon
Instead of its scheduled 4,200-mile, nine-hour 50-minute non-stop journey to Gatwick, the Air India flight came down just 1.5 miles beyond the end of the runway, in the densely-populated Meghaninagar neighbourhood of the city in Gujarat, northwest India.
The jet smashed into the doctors’ hostel of BJ Medical College, sending debris, smoke and fire hundreds of feet into the air, and turning the whole area into what looked like a war zone.
As well as most on board, at least 50 people on the ground are said to have been killed and scores more injured.
Doctors, students and staff were having lunch in the hostel’s canteen when the Boeing 787’s landing gear embedded itself in the hall with a deafening boom. Hellish video showed shellshocked diners fleeing amid tables laid out with abandoned lunches.
The tail end of the 186-foot fuselage was pictured sticking out of an upper storey of the college, and other large chunks including a severed wing were scattered around the neighbourhood. Some five or six nearby buildings were instantly turned into infernos by the catastrophic fireball; the Air India plane had been laden with 80 to 90 tons of aviation fuel for the long journey to London.
Plumes of billowing black smoke could be seen for miles around and emergency services battled for hours to contain multiple blazes.
Somehow, amid this firestorm of death and chaos, out walked the ‘luckiest man in the world’. Mr Ramesh, from the Dreamliner’s Seat 11A, seemingly displayed barely any visible serious injuries as he was filmed hobbling from the disaster zone.
The British father’s miraculous survival is all the more astonishing given that, not only did he get off a crashed plane, he then apparently managed to navigate a raging inferno.
He walked unaided from a neighbourhood that was an apocalyptic scene. Charred bodies were scattered among twisted metal and scorched earth. Suitcases – some incongruously unscathed – were strewn among the debris, and blackened trees lay upended and smouldering.
Indian TV showed pictures of victims being rushed away on stretchers to ambulances.
Viswashkumar Ramesh video called his family with a bloodied face after walking away from the burning aircraft
Police said they had found a lone survivor who had been sitting in seat 11A when Flight 171 crashed shortly after takeoff in India this morning
Astonishing footage showed the man walking away from the scene with some visible injuries to his face
Vidhi Chaudhary, a top state police commissioner, said the dead included medical students, adding: ‘Most of the bodies have been charred beyond recognition.’Last night as the scale of destruction was becoming clear, acrid smoke hung in the air as hundreds of rescue workers toiled through the night under searchlights seeking survivors.
Authorities faced a grim task of identifying corpses, with relatives urged to supply DNA samples to help.
Locals who had witnessed their ordinary day turn to carnage in a split-second were struggling to come to terms with a disaster that has been compared to the day in 1988 when 207 lives were lost at Lockerbie, Scotland, when Pan Am 103 was blown out of the sky.
A woman called Ramila told the Ani news agency: ‘My son had gone to the hostel during lunch break, and the plane crashed there. He jumped from the second floor, so he suffered some injuries.’Neighbour Raju Prajapati added: ‘We heard a huge explosion and rushed out of our homes. There were thick plumes of black smoke rising into the sky. People were shouting and running in all directions.
‘Ambulance after ambulance has been arriving. The police and army have cordoned off the area and are not allowing anyone near the wreckage. There is panic and confusion. We are about two kilometres away now, and even here the smoke is still visible.’Another resident said: ‘We saw people from the building jumping from the second and third floor to save themselves. The plane was in flames.’A doctor named Krishna who rescued around 15 students with his colleagues said that ‘the nose and front wheel landed on the canteen building where students were having lunch’ and that he saw ‘about 15 to 20 burnt bodies’.
At Ahmedabad Airport, families who had just waved off loved-ones faced the gut-wrenching view of smoke rising on the horizon. Distraught Poonam Patel said: ‘My sister-in-law was going to London. The plane has crashed. We don’t know anything.’Teams of international air accident investigators have begun the process of recovering and examining the ‘black box’ recorders of flight data and cockpit conversations to work out what went wrong. According to local reports, the Boeing aircraft had undergone a service as recently as March.
Yesterday aviation experts put forward two leading theories: a flock of birds being sucked into the engines, disabling them both when needed most, and a mystery over the aircraft’s ‘flaps’.
Captain Saurabh Bhatnagar, a former senior pilot, said the engines may have failed after a bird-strike, similar to the Jeju Air crash in South Korea last December. He said: ‘From the footage I have seen, it looks like prima facie the case of multiple bird hits. The takeoff was perfect.’ Salil Colge, a lecturer in aviation management at University College Birmingham, added: ‘Historically there have been reports of several bird strikes in this area in the past, and that could be one of the possibilities.’But others said there were no puffs of smoke from engines in the video footage, which might be expected from bird-strikes.
Marco Chan, of Buckinghamshire New University, in Wycombe, queried the apparent position of the flaps on the wings. There was speculation the plane was not correctly set up for takeoff, with the flaps not properly deployed. They are segments of the wing that can be extended to assist with lift. If set wrongly, they could stall the plane.
Terry Tozer, a former pilot and author of the book ‘Why planes crash’, told Sky News an issue with the flaps was ‘a reasonably logical explanation for a well-designed aircraft sinking to the earth in this way.’
