Dead bodies, mangled luggage, debris haunt rescuers at Air India crash site

(Bloomberg) — Students of the B.J. Medical College were having lunch in their hostel dining hall on Thursday when a Boeing 787 jet loaded with fuel smashed into the building and exploded.

Flight AI171 had taken off just minutes earlier from a nearby airport in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, before making a perilous descent that ended in the death of all but one of the 242 people aboard. The number of casualties among those on the ground and the building the plane slammed into is less clear.

Those that rushed to the site in the wake of the crash were met with haunting visuals: a charred plane wing lay strewn across a road. Fragments of another wing and engine parts were nearby, along with clothes and mangled bags. A pungent smell of burnt debris lingered in the air.  

“The blast was so intense that no one could approach the site initially,” said Rajesh Patel, a 56-year-old real estate businessman. He was heading home for lunch on Thursday afternoon, but instead spent the next seven hours helping pull out bodies from the wreckage along with rescue workers. “The scene was horrific, with bodies scattered everywhere.”

About 150 to 200 people, including students and workers, were inside the medical college hostel building when disaster struck, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.

“We collected the remains in bags and clothing, and later used sarees and sacks,” Patel said. “The rescue operation continued until 9 p.m., during which I personally collected around 50 bodies.”

The official death toll will be announced only after DNA verification, according to Amit Shah, India’s federal home minister.

Investigators are combing the wreckage to determine what caused the Boeing Co. Dreamliner to crash. One of the two black boxes from the plane have been found, India’s Aviation Ministry said Friday.

The last communication from flight captain Sumeet Sabharwal to air traffic control was “Mayday…no thrust, losing power, unable to lift,” the UK’s Telegraph newspaper reported.

The flight was carrying 12 crew and 230 passengers, most of whom were Indian and British nationals. 

Azaz Vohra, 29, has been waiting outside the local hospital since Thursday evening to collect the bodies of his cousin and two other relatives, including a child.

“We had dropped Yasmin Vohra, my aunt, cousin Parvez Vohra, and his four-year-old daughter Zuveria Vohra at the airport on Thursday,” Vohra said.

Vohra’s cousin had visited India for dental treatment, bringing along his younger daughter while his wife and elder daughter stayed behind in the UK, he said.

“We haven’t received any updates from the hospital authorities,” Vohra said, showing photos of his relatives on his phone.

Ahmedabad is the biggest city in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat. The country’s premier business school is also located there. Modi visited the crash site on Friday and met the lone survivor from the Air India flight.

“Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise,” Ramesh Vishwaskumar, who sat in the first row of economy class, told local reporters, according to the Hindustan Times newspaper. He walked out unassisted from the burning plane.  

“There were dead bodies around me. I got scared. I got up and ran. There were pieces of the plane everywhere,” he said. Media outlets identified him as a UK citizen aged 40, from the city of Leicester.

Dead bodies were being released in batches on Friday from the hospital’s post-mortem room. Medical students were overcome with emotion as they received the bodies of friends who had lost their lives.

At the crash site, surrounded by burnt debris and scattered aircraft parts, a woman who identified herself as Babhiben was sitting in anguish, mourning the loss of her grandson.

The 14-year-old boy, Akash, was neither a passenger nor a resident at the hostel. He simply happened to be in the neighbourhood.