Image: Indian Prime Minister’s Office.
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Thursday, an Air India Boeing 787-8 bound for Gatwick Airport in London crashed into Ahmenabad, Gujarat, northwestern India shortly after takeoff from a nearby airport. It was 1:38 p.m. local time (08:08 UTC). All but one of the 242 people on board perished in the crash, along with dozens more on the ground.
The plane struck the city’s Meghani Nagar neighborhood, crushing a residential building belonging to a nearby medical school. Firefighters and other emergency personnel reached the crash site and began loading victims onto stretchers.
Air India’s parent company, Tata Group, promised to pay for the medical care of the injured and to help rebuild the medical college. It also offered 10 million rupees (US$116,117) to the families of of those who died in the crash.
Boeing, the United States National Transportation Safety Board, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration all announced that they planned to cooperate with Indian authorities in investigating the crash.
The crash’s sole survivor, a British-Indian man named Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, told the Hindustan Times that the plane made a loud noise almost immediately after takeoff: “When I got up, there were bodies all around me. I was scared. I stood up and ran. There were pieces of the plane all around me. Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital.”
A local resident told Agence France-Presse, “We saw people from the building jumping from the second and third floor to save themselves. The plane was in flames. We helped people get out of the building and sent the injured to the hospital.”
Per Aviation Safety Network data, this is the first reported crash of any version of the 787. The 787-8 subseries is designed specifically to handle long, nonstop routes. The 787 fleet, called Dreamliners, carried its billionth passenger in May 2025, fourteen years after first entering airline use.
Sources
[edit]
- Emine Sinmaz and Hannah Ellis-Petersen. “Briton is ‘sole survivor’ of Air India plane crash that killed more than 290, police say” — Guardian, June 12, 2025
- Aimee Pichi. “Air India crash puts spotlight on Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner safety and the company’s recent troubles” — CBS News, June 12, 2025
- Nick Marsh. “What does the Air India crash mean for Boeing?” — BBC Online, June 12, 2025
