An Air India flight, AI171, carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members, crashed just 30 seconds after takeoff from Ahmedabad Airport, heading towards London Gatwick. For comparison, the Boeing Dreamliner, which has been in service for 11 years, touched down 20 minutes early. Unexpectedly, just a few minutes later, the crash happened.
Judging from his industry experience, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal seemed a very seasoned pilot with first officer Clive Kunder as his co-pilot. Among the crew was Nganthoi Sharma Kongbrailatpam, a 21-year-old flight attendant who hailed from India’s northeastern state of Manipur. The flight, full of young people from different cultures around the world, had 53 British citizens, multiple Portuguese citizens and one Canadian onboard.
As they waited, witnesses described how, right after takeoff, the plane pitched up steeply before stalling. This occurred only 10 seconds after it took off from the runway. After this stall, it started shedding altitude in earnest. Unfortunately, the plane went down into a local hostel that houses medical students and doctors working at the teaching hospital adjacent to it.
Eyewitness accounts from our members on the ground paint a vivid picture of the chaos that ensued. Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a passenger seated in 11A, described the moment of the crash: “Thirty seconds after takeoff, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed.” His brother Melvin sat one row behind him in 11J, and together they were about to confront an even worse nightmare.
The airplane originally had over 100,000 liters of fuel. At the time of the collapse, it was carrying more than 200 tonnes. As it came down, it hit a local canteen building where students were eating lunch. Krishna, a local doctor who witnessed the incident, described what he saw. He continued, “Just as the students were having lunch, the nose and front wheel came down on the canteen building.”
Many were still in shock from the crash’s aftermath. Prajapathi, a local resident and first responder at the scene, mentioned his horrifying experience: “The first person I helped was a young woman who had sustained severe burn injuries. Before we could take her to the hospital, she succumbed in the ambulance.”
The families of these crew members have been impacted by this tragedy in unimaginable ways. A distraught relative of flight attendant Kongbrailatpam expressed her anguish: “My child, my child, I raised with these hands, where have you gone? I want to see you. Where are you?”
Rescue operations were undertaken immediately though emergency services soon faced numerous challenges due to the severity of the crash. Keyur Prajapathi described seeing black smoke rising from the wreckage: “I looked outside the window and saw black smoke.… Within seconds, our phones … began ringing. It then took me two to three additional minutes to figure out what I had missed.”