AHMEDABAD, India – Nayan Vagadaya had driven more than three hours to the hospital when he heard his uncle was among the victims of the Air India plane crash, which has traumatized and captivated this nation.
The 23-year-old arrived to a postmortem room filled with 50 charred bodies and scattered limbs but couldn’t identify his uncle, who had been traveling to London to escort his daughter to her wedding.
The shock and grief inside Ahmedabad’s Civil Hospital and the nearby B.J. Medical College were still raw Friday morning, and the full scale of the tragedy was still coming into view. The plane had ripped through the dining hall of the medical college – on the perimeter of the airport – as students were eating their lunch.
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At least 269 people were confirmed dead, according to senior police official Vishaka Dabral, including all but one of the 242 passengers and crew aboard the flight. But students and faculty at the college expected the death toll to climb, considering how busy the dining hall was at the time of the crash.
The disaster unfolded with stunning speed. Closed-circuit television footage verified by The Washington Post showed the plane lifting off and then, within moments, inexplicably falling from the sky.
“In a minute, everything has changed,” Vagadaya said from the hospital auditorium, where relatives waited Friday to give blood samples to help identify their loved ones. On Thursday, the room had been filled with panic and confusion; now, it had become a place of mourning.
Flight 171 had been carrying 169 Indians, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese nationals and one Canadian, according to Air India. The 12 crew members were Indian.
The pilots of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner – Capt. Sumeet Sabharwal and First Officer Clive Kundar – issued a “Mayday” distress call shortly after takeoff Thursday, India’s civil aviation regulatory authority said in a statement provided on WhatsApp. There was no further communication from the cockpit, it said.
Air India did not respond to requests for comment.
Aviation experts said it was too soon to reach conclusions about what caused the crash. India’s civil aviation minister tweeted Friday 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 findings can generally be issued two weeks after recovering the flight data recorder, but a final report can take more time.
Other analysts pointed to abnormal takeoff configurations. Jeff Guzzetti, a former Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigator, said the videos appeared to show the landing gear remained down, and the flaps were still up.
“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 a book about the financial turmoil of the airline.
Rahul Bhatia, a student at the medical college, was frantic Friday morning, switching between phone calls and responding to WhatsApp groups, trying to help classmates find the missing.
He was still in shock from the stories coming in. A friend’s wife, seven months pregnant, was killed in the dormitory when the plane ripped through the ceiling.
“I’ll remember this for the rest of my life,” Bhatia said.
Major aviation disasters are rare in India, though Air India, which became privately owned in recent years after decades as the country’s national carrier, has been involved in deadly incidents before.
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 people on board. In 2010, 158 people were killed when an Air India Express plane overshot the runway while landing in the western city of Mangalore.
There has been “no accountability,” said Ranganathan, the former pilot instructor.
Since its privatization in 2022, Air India – now owned by the Tata Group – has faced regulatory setbacks. In March, 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 training hours.
Two months before, India’s civil aviation regulator fined the airline about $35,000 after it allowed a pilot to operate a flight without completing the mandatory number of takeoffs and landings. In March 2024, Air India was found to be in violation of flight duty time limitations – rules that help prevent pilot fatigue – and fined around $93,000.
None of those violations could explain Thursday’s crash, Bhargava said. But “at the end of the day, the accountability is with the airline,” he said.
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 will probably focus on the actions of the pilots, the airline, jet maintenance and Boeing – which has struggled for years to recover from two air disasters in 2018 and 2019, both involving a design flaw in a smaller jet, the 737 Max. Those crashes killed a combined 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
“I will not judge by previous controversies,” Bhargava said. “I will judge by the safety track record of the Dreamliner.” More than 1,100 Dreamliners in service worldwide had carried 1 billion passengers with no fatal crashes until this week, according to Boeing.
In a news conference Thursday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said the NTSB and FAA were deploying investigators to assist India.
Duffy added that the inquiry was in its early stages but promised to act if safety failures were identified. “When one of these planes go down, we take it very seriously,” he said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the crash site Friday, touring the wreckage and speaking with Viswashkumar Ramesh, the flight’s sole survivor. News outlet ANI released an image of Modi looking up at the aircraft’s mangled tail jutting out from the wall of the college. The prime minister did not speak to reporters.
Back at the hospital, still bedridden from his injuries, Ramesh spoke briefly to local media.
He told the state-run 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.”