The Latest:
- Boeing Dreamliner crashed 5 minutes after takeoff in India Thursday afternoon.
- Flight was scheduled to arrive at London’s Gatwick Airport Thursday evening.
- 242 passengers and crew aboard.
- At least one Canadian citizen, 53 U.K. citizens on plane.
- Ahmedabad residents on the ground may have died, city official says.
- Modi, Starmer, Air India express condolences to affected families.
An Air India passenger plane bound for London with more than 240 people on board crashed Thursday in India’s northwestern city of Ahmedabad, the airline said.
The airline said the flight was carrying 242 passengers and crew overall. Indian officials had previously said 244 were on board.
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.
Ahmedabad’s city police commissioner was pessimistic about the prospect of crash survivors, in comments made to the Associated Press.
“It appears there are no survivors in the plane crash,” commissioner G.S. Malik said, adding that with the plane crashing in a residential area with offices, “some locals would have also died.”
“Exact figures on casualties are being ascertained,” he said.
Firefighters doused the smoking wreckage of the plane, which would have been fully loaded with fuel shortly after takeoff, and surrounding multi-storey buildings with water. Charred bodies lay on the ground.
The flight was bound for London’s Gatwick, the U.K. airport confirmed.
Air India in a social media post said that in addition to 169 Indian nationals, there were 53 British citizens, seven on board from Portugal and one Canadian citizen.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was in contact with all of India’s ministers charged with responding to the crash.
“The tragedy in Ahmedabad has stunned and saddened us,” said Modi. “It is heartbreaking beyond words. In this sad hour, my thoughts are with everyone affected by it.”
1st Dreamliner crash
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 centre 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 Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the scenes in India “devastating” and said he was “being updated as the situation develops, and my thoughts are with the passengers and their families at this deeply distressing time.”
The 787 Dreamliner is a widebody, twin-engined plane. This is the first crash ever of a Boeing 787 aircraft, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.
The aircraft was introduced in 2009 and more than 1,000 have been delivered to dozens of airlines, according to the flightradar24 website. American Airlines has the largest Dreamliner fleet, while Air Canada also has dozens in operation.
The crash occurs amid reports that the U.S. Justice Department reached a deal recently with Boeing that would allow the airplane giant to avoid criminal prosecution for allegedly misleading American regulators about the 737 Max jetliner before two crashes which killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.
Those Boeing crashes occurred five months apart in Indonesia and in Ethiopia, with 18 Canadian citizens among the dead in the Ethiopian incident.
Boeing said in a brief statement: “We are aware of initial reports and are working to gather more information.”
Shares of Boeing Co. tumbled nearly 9 per cent before trading opened in the U.S.
The last major plane crash in India occurred in 2020 when an Air India Express Boeing 737 skidded off a runway in the southern city of Kozhikode, killing 18 people.