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India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has visited the site in Ahmedabad, where an Air India jet crashed on Thursday, killing more than 200 people in the country’s worst civil aviation disaster in almost three decades.
Video footage from the site showed the Indian leader on Friday viewing the wreckage of the plane, including a portion of its tail, as well as burnt buildings at a medical student compound near the airport where the Boeing 787-800 Dreamliner crashed.
“The scene of devastation is saddening,” the Indian leader wrote in a social media post. “Met officials and teams working tirelessly in the aftermath. Our thoughts remain with those who lost their loved ones in this unimaginable tragedy.”
ANI, a news agency close to the Modi government, reported that the prime minister visited victims of the disaster in hospital, including the sole survivor, a British man identified by Indian officials as Viswash Kumar Ramesh, who had been seated near an emergency exit.
“Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed,” Ramesh told India’s Hindustan Times newspaper. “It all happened so quickly,” he said from his hospital bed.
Air India confirmed early on Friday that all but one of the people on board the 12-year-old Boeing bound from Ahmedabad, in western Gujarat state, for London Gatwick airport, had died. The plane had been carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew.
“The passengers comprised 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese nationals and one Canadian national. The survivor is a British national of Indian origin,” Air India said.
Unverified videos of the Boeing 787-800 Dreamliner showed the plane losing altitude shortly after take-off and then exploding in a fireball that left plumes of smoke billowing above houses.
Forensic teams were examining wreckage overnight at the hostel compound. Mangled parts of aircraft were spread across hundreds of meters.
The plane crashed on the state-run BJ Medical College when students were having lunch. The Federation of All India Medical Association said up to five students were missing and another 60 injured including three in critical condition. The wife of one resident doctor was found dead, it added.
Labourers who worked near the building were also reported dead.
Late on Thursday, home affairs minister Amit Shah said authorities had retrieved most of the bodies. He added that an official number of deaths would be released after the victims had been identified and DNA samples from the crash site were matched with relatives.
“I definitely want to say one thing — it is an accident and no one can stop an accident,” he said.
The crash was a major setback for flag carrier Air India, which was bought by conglomerate Tata Group in 2022. The formerly state-owned group is midway through a five-year turnaround that includes the replacement or refurbishment of its fleet’s older jets.
Air India said on Friday that it was “giving its full co-operation to the authorities investigating this incident”. Civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said the Modi government was launching a “fair and thorough investigation” to get to the “depth of why this incident has happened”.
“We have to wait and see what comes out of the black box,” said Jitender Bhargava, a former Air India executive director and author of the book The descent of Air India. “The pilots must have spoken in the cockpit before the tragedy.”
US President Donald Trump said late on Thursday that he had told the Indian government that if there’s “anything we can do, we’ll be over there immediately”.
The last fatal plane crash in India, the world’s third-largest air passenger market, was five years ago. A Boeing 737 from Air India Express, the airline’s low-cost unit, was landing from Dubai when it skidded off the runway in Kozhikode, southern India, and plunged into a valley, killing 21 people.
Ten years earlier, another Air India Express aircraft from Dubai crashed on landing in Mangalore, killing 158.
India’s worst-ever civil aviation disaster was the 1996 mid-air collision between a Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 and a Kazakhstan Airlines Ilyushin Il-76 that killed all 349 people across both aircraft.
