India plane crash: What we know so far   

PARIS, June 12, 2025 : London-bound Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner carrying 242 people crashed on Thursday in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, with officials saying that just one person survived.

Here is what we know so far:

– What happened? –    
The Gatwick Airport-bound aeroplane left Ahmedabad, the main city of India’s Gujarat state, with 242 people on board.

Air India’s flight 171 issued a mayday call and crashed “immediately after takeoff”, around 1:40 pm (0810 GMT), the Directorate General of Civil Aviation said.

Several videos posted on social media, which AFP was not able to immediately verify, showed an aircraft rapidly losing altitude — with its nose up — before it hit a building and exploded into a ball of fire.

Air India said the passengers included 169 Indians, 53 Britons, seven Portuguese nationals and a Canadian. Two pilots and 10 cabin crew were also aboard.

– Scenes of horror –    
The plane smashed into a building housing doctors and their families in a crowded residential area of Ahmedabad, a city home to about eight million people.

At the site of the crash between a hospital and the Ghoda Camp neighbourhood, an AFP journalist saw people recovering bodies and firefighters trying to douse the smouldering wreckage.

A resident, who declined to be named, said: “We saw people from the building jumping from the second and third floor to save themselves. The plane was in flames.”

“When we reached the spot there were several bodies lying around and firefighters were dousing the flames,” another resident, Poonam Patni, told AFP, adding that many of the bodies were burned.

A doctor named Krishna said that “the nose and front wheel landed on the canteen building where students were having lunch.”

He said he saw “about 15 to 20 burnt bodies”, while he and his colleagues rescued around 15 students.

– ‘One survivor’ –    
Although a city police commissioner initially told AFP that there appeared to be no survivors, a state health official later said there was one.

“Yes, one survivor is confirmed,” Dhananjay Dwivedi, principal secretary of Gujarat state’s health department, told AFP.

So far, rescue teams supported by the military have recovered 204 bodies, with casualties from the plane and the area surrounding the crash.

The city police commissioner told AFP that since the plane had crashed in a residential area, he expected “more casualties”.

India’s aviation ministry deployed all aviation and emergency response agencies “to take swift and coordinated action”.

The airport was shut with all flights suspended until further notice.

The airline’s chairman, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, said an emergency centre had been activated and a support team set up for families seeking information.

– Boeing investigating the incident –
US planemaker Boeing said it was “working to gather more information” on the incident and that it was ready to support Air India.

The UK and US said they were dispatching air accident investigation teams to support their Indian counterparts.

A source close to the case said this was the first time a 787 Dreamliner had crashed.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is the pride of the US company’s catalogue for long-distance planes: a fuel-efficient, wide-body, lightweight aircraft able to transport up to 330 people.

Tata Group, owners of Air India, offered financial aid of 10 million rupees ($117,000) to the families of each victim and promised to cover the medical expenses of those injured. AFP