A London-bound Boeing Dreamliner with 242 passengers on board has crashed immediately after take off in Ahmedabad, India.
Among those killed were people on ground where it had crashed.
Although there are no immediate cause of the crash, it was learnt Ahmedabad police have said there was at least one survivor from the flight.
According to reports, the sole survivor of the crash was 40-year-old Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a British-Indian, who lives in London and was in Ahmedabad visiting family.
He said he had lived in London for the past 20 years and had travelled to India with his brother who was also on the plane.
India’s home minister said he had met with the survivor. The victims included students at a medical college where the plane crashed.
Agency reports quoting the lone survival indicated that “Thirty seconds after take off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly,” said Ramesh.
He said he “impact injuries”, including bruising on his chest, eyes and feet but was otherwise lucid and conscious.
Ramesh, who still had his boarding pass, told Hindustan Times:
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.
In his response, the President of the United State, Mr. Donald Trump described the incident as “one of the most worst crashes in aviation history”.
The US president, speaking at the White House, said he has offered “anything we can do” to Indian authorities after the “horrific crash”. Trump said:
Nobody had any idea what happened. It looks like it was flying just fine.
Ahmedabad police Chief G.S. Malik said the bodies recovered could include both passengers and people killed on the ground. The dead included Vijay Rupani, the former Chief Minister of Gujarat state, of which Ahmedabad is the main city.
Parts of the plane’s body were said to have scattered around the smouldering building into which it crashed. The tail of the plane was stuck on top of the building.
The passengers included 217 adults, 11 children and two infants. Air India said 169 were Indian nationals, 53 were Britons, seven Portuguese, and one Canadian.
Aviation tracking site Flightradar24 said the plane was a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, one of the most modern passenger aircraft in service.
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, 12th June, 2025 flew for the first time in 2013 and was delivered to Air India in January 2014, Flightradar24 said.
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