Air India crash, a year later: Time stands still on the ground, survivors remember their miraculous escape

Then, everyone started screaming and trying to escape from the building.

In Gujarat’s worst air disaster since 1988, 260 people lost their lives, including 241 passengers and crew aboard the airliner, and 19 people on the ground, when the plane bound for London Gatwick airport crashed within minutes of take-off from Ahmedabad. Kumar was the sole survivor on board.

A total of 260 people died in the crash, including 19 on the ground. (Express File Photo)

After the aircraft hit the mess building, its tail end got embedded in the structure, even as the rest of the plane struck four hostel blocks beyond it.

A year later, little has changed on the spot, including the gaping hole in the mess wall where the plane came in, and an overhead tank bent at an unnatural angle due to the impact. Inside, with the concrete falling off, construction rods stand exposed and bent out of shape, electrical wires hang bare, and swarms of pigeons — the scourge of empty places — have settled in. The mess has come up in a row of hostel blocks that are located 500 metres from the destroyed one. “The women cooks rush out every time a large aircraft passes overhead,” Patel says.

Daksha suffered both physically and psychologically, he adds. “The women had jumped over a marble counter and out of the windows to escape. She hurt her L4 and L5 vertebrae. She was so scared that she went to live with her parents in Maharashtra for a month. It was only after her anxiety subsided that she returned and got treated for her injuries.” Air India paid for the treatment.

The Patni family that makes a living selling fruits and vegetables also count themselves as lucky. They live along a dirt path adjoining the medical college’s hostel compound, and two of its members who used to work in the mess had left the jobs days earlier when the accident happened.

Sitting outside her kuchcha house with a tarpaulin roof, which overlooks the burnt hostel buildings, Jyotsna Ajay Patni says: “When the crash happened, I was sitting right here. We ran as fast as we could, and took shelter in a one-room building behind our house. The trees were all scorched and so was our home.” Her mother Asha and sister Neha used to work at the mess. “Their lives were spared by the grace of God,” says Jyotsna.

The first responders used the Patni family’s hand carts to haul bodies, but by the time they made their way back home, Jyotsna’s father Sattu Patni says, they were in for a shock. “Someone had robbed the money we had saved for my younger daughter’s wedding.”

The other shock was the death of 13-year-old boy Aakash Patni, the son of a teaseller sleeping on the pavement nearby, who was among the casualties on the ground. His mother Sita who was with him suffered extensive burns.

Jyotsna says she keeps thinking of Aakash. “He used to come and sit with us every day. He was taken away at such a young age.”

Opposite the Patni home, 15-feet-high mounds of sand have lately been deposited along the boundary wall of the hostel block. This is the spot picked by the Gujarat government to rebuild the hostels destroyed in the crash.

However, many have objected to this, demanding a memorial to those killed instead. Eighteen others besides Aakash died on the ground that day. Families of some have left Ahmedabad.

Like Ravi Thakore, whose entire family worked in the hostels. Thakore and wife Lalita were delivering tiffins when the plane crashed, killing their daughter Aadhya and Thakore’s mother Sarla. They had left Aadhya with Sarla as they did their rounds.

The bodies of Sarla and Aadhya were among the four people who died on the ground who could be identified only by DNA profiling. Their last rites were done seven days later, on June 19. The Thakores stopped working at the hostels after that.

Earlier this month, the neighbours said, they left Ahmedabad for good to migrate back to their home town of Patan.