“I saw my child for the first time in two years. It was a great time,” Anil Patel said of the reunion with his son and daughter-in-law, just before they boarded Air India Flight 171. “And now, there is nothing.”
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner left Ahmedabad bound for London Gatwick on June 12, 2025. It came down 32 seconds after takeoff, 1.7 kilometres from the runway, on the hostels of the B.J. Medical College. Fire swept through five buildings, among them student accommodation and the resident doctors’ hostel.
A toll that changed
In the first days the numbers were far higher than the final count. An Indian police source said on the Saturday that 279 bodies had been recovered, up from an earlier figure of 265, and a report at the time put at least 38 of the dead on the ground. The officer asked not to be named and said the official number would wait for DNA identification.
That work took two weeks. The fires were estimated to have reached 1,500 °C, which made identification slow, and by 28 June the remains of all 260 victims had been identified, mostly through DNA profiling. The 260 comprised all 12 crew and 229 of the 230 passengers, plus 19 people on the ground. Another 67 people on the ground were seriously injured.
The passengers came from several countries: 169 Indians, 53 Britons, 7 Portuguese and 1 Canadian. Thirteen were children, two of them infants. Among the dead was Vijay Rupani, who served as Gujarat’s Chief Minister from 2016 to 2021. Relatives, some flown in from overseas, gave DNA samples to find their own.
One passenger survived. Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British citizen, had been in seat 11A beside an emergency exit. He said his section of the aircraft broke away and ended up on the ground floor of the hostel, and he got out through an opening where the exit had broken. He was filmed walking away from the wreckage, and was discharged from hospital after five days. Six days after the crash he attended the funeral of his brother, who had been on the same flight.
The inquiry
India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau led the investigation, with investigators from Britain and a team from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board assisting. GE Aerospace, which made the engines, also sent people to India. Tata Group Chairman N Chandrasekaran called the crash “one of the darkest days” in the company’s history.
The first of the two flight recorders was found on 13 June on the mess hall rooftop, and the second was pulled from debris on 16 June. Only the front unit yielded data.
The bureau’s preliminary report, issued on 12 July 2025, found that both engines lost thrust after their fuel control switches moved from RUN to CUTOFF about three seconds after liftoff. The cockpit voice recording captured one pilot asking the other why he had cut off the fuel. The other said he had not. The report did not say which pilot spoke. About 10 seconds after the first switch went to CUTOFF it moved back to RUN, and the engines tried to restart. A mayday call followed.
Later, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News reported, citing officials and people close to the investigation, that investigators leaned toward the view that a pilot had crashed the aircraft deliberately. In July 2026 the bureau said it expected a draft final report by October 2026.
It was the first fatal accident and hull loss for the 787 since the type entered service in 2011. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation ordered extra pre-departure inspections for Air India’s 787 fleet, starting on 15 June.
Sources
- Air India Flight 171 – Wikipedia
- Latest updates: Black box recovered from Air India crash site as families await answers
- India plane crash kills dozens on the ground as death toll hits 279
