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The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, with 242 people on board, which was headed for Gatwick Airport, south of the UK capital, had only one known survivor after it crashed onto a medical college hostel on Thursday night AEST.
She said the death toll was more than 240, revising down a previous toll of 294. It was not immediately clear how many of the dead had been on the aircraft or on the ground.
According to air traffic control at Ahmedabad Airport, the aircraft departed at 1:39 pm. It gave a Mayday call, signalling an emergency, but thereafter there was no response from the aircraft. Source: SBS News
‘It all happened so quickly’
“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,” he said. “Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital.”
It was the first crash for the Dreamliner, which began flying commercially in 2011, according to the Aviation Safety Network database. The plane that crashed on Thursday flew for the first time in 2013 and was delivered to Air India in January 2014, Flightradar24 said.
Plane crashed just after take off
According to air traffic control at Ahmedabad Airport, the aircraft departed at 1:39 pm. It gave a Mayday call, signalling an emergency, but thereafter there was no response from the aircraft.
Officials inspect the site of a plane crash near Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Source: AAP / Rajat Gupta/EPA
India’s Civil Aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu said that a formal investigation has been initiated by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau.
Britain was also working with Indian authorities to establish the facts around the crash and to provide support to those involved, the country’s foreign office said.
