Captain Sumeet Sabharwal's desperate final words captured the terrifying moments before Air India's Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner crashed in Ahmedabad, claiming the lives of 241 passengers and crew.
According to the Daily Mail, the experienced pilot frantically radioed "Mayday…no thrust, losing power, unable to lift" just seconds before the London-bound aircraft plummeted into a medical college building.
The flight, which departed from Ahmedabad Airport on Thursday morning, crashed shortly after takeoff when it was only about 400 feet above ground. In the final 17 seconds before impact, Captain Sabharwal and his co-pilot Clive Kundar struggled desperately with the controls as their state-of-the-art aircraft lost altitude and speed.
One British passenger, Viswashkumar Ramesh, miraculously survived the catastrophic crash that killed everyone else onboard and at least 50 people on the ground. Ramesh, who had been seated in 11A, was traveling with his brother, who perished in the disaster.
Video footage captured Ramesh walking away from the apocalyptic scene with visible injuries to his face. His survival has been deemed extraordinary, given the complete destruction of the aircraft and the intense fires that erupted when the plane's fuel tanks ignited.
The crash site in the densely-populated Meghaninagar neighborhood turned into what witnesses described as "a war zone." The Boeing jet smashed into the doctors' hostel of BJ Medical College, embedding its landing gear in the canteen where medical students were having lunch.
Aviation experts have put forward two primary explanations for the sudden loss of power that doomed the aircraft. Captain Saurabh Bhatnagar, a former senior pilot, suggested the engines may have failed after bird strikes, citing the takeoff as "perfect" before the loss of power.
"From the footage I have seen, it looks like prima facie the case of multiple bird hits," Bhatnagar stated. Salil Colge, an aviation management lecturer, added support to this theory noting that "historically there have been reports of several bird strikes in this area in the past."
However, other experts pointed to concerns about the aircraft's wing flaps. Terry Tozer, a former pilot and author, told Sky News that an issue with flaps was "a reasonably logical explanation for a well-designed aircraft sinking to the earth in this way." The footage didn't show puffs of smoke from the engines that might be expected with bird strikes.
The crash created a massive fireball as the aircraft's 80 to 90 tons of aviation fuel ignited upon impact. Multiple buildings in the vicinity were engulfed in flames, with debris scattered across a wide area of the neighborhood.
Eyewitness Raju Prajapati described the horrific scene: "We heard a huge explosion and rushed out of our homes. There were thick plumes of black smoke rising into the sky. People were shouting and running in all directions."
Another resident reported seeing people jumping from the second and third floors of buildings to escape the flames. A doctor named Krishna, who rescued approximately 15 students, said that "the nose and front wheel landed on the canteen building where students were having lunch" and that he saw "about 15 to 20 burnt bodies."
International air accident investigators have begun the process of recovering and examining the "black box" flight data and cockpit voice recorders. These critical pieces of equipment should provide crucial information about what went wrong during the flight's final moments.
Authorities now face the grim task of identifying victims, many of whom were "charred beyond recognition," according to Vidhi Chaudhary, a top state police commissioner. Relatives of victims have been asked to provide DNA samples to assist with identification efforts.
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner had reportedly undergone maintenance service as recently as March. The crash is already being compared to the 1988 Lockerbie disaster in Scotland, where 207 people lost their lives when Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb.
