Ahmedabad plane crash brings up memories of Indian Airlines flight’s 1988 air tragedy

The flight had taken off from Mumbai, bound for Ahmedabad, when it encountered treacherous weather. Haze had reduced visibility to a mere 1.2 miles, a condition challenging even for seasoned pilots.

To navigate this, the crew chose a localiser-DME approach—a technique that uses radio signals to guide the aircraft to the runway when the pilots can’t rely on their eyes alone. At 6.41 am, they radioed their position over the Ahmedabad VOR (very-high frequency omni-directional range) a navigation beacon, confirming they were following descent instructions.

That call was their last.

Moments later, disaster unfolded. The aircraft grazed trees and smashed into an electricity pylon near Chiloda Kotarpur, a village close to the airport. It then plunged into a paddy field, erupting into a fireball that consumed the plane.

Amid the wreckage, only two survivors emerged: Ashok Agarwal, a textile businessman, and Vinod Tripathi, a former vice-chancellor of Gujarat Vidyapith. Both suffered severe injuries. For Agarwal, the loss was even deeper, his wife and infant daughter died in the crash. He spent years grappling with trauma and memory loss, retreating from the world until his death in 2020, which police attributed to a likely cardiac arrest.

The investigation

Investigators quickly turned to the cockpit voice recorder for answers. The recordings painted a troubling picture: the pilots were straining to spot the runway through the haze, distracted from monitoring the plane’s altitude.

They skipped critical steps including failing to request landing clearance from the tower or announce their altitude as required during the descent. These oversights pointed to a loss of situational awareness in the flight’s final moments.

The official inquiry pinned the crash on pilot error. Both the captain and co-pilot had strayed from standard procedures for landing in such poor visibility. But the blame didn’t stop there.

The report also criticised air traffic control for not clearly communicating how bad the visibility had become and for failing to update the pilots on the runway visual range (RVR)—a key measure of how far a pilot can see down the runway, vital for safe landings in murky conditions.

A deeper probe by the Justice Mathur Commission uncovered broader failures.

It concluded that both Indian Airlines and the Airports Authority of India (AAI) bore responsibility—a case of “composite negligence”. This finding fuelled legal action from survivors and victims’ families, who sought accountability and compensation.

In 2003, a civil court awarded payments with interest to those affected. Years later, the Gujarat High Court stepped in, boosting the interest rate and assigning 90 per cent of the financial liability to Indian Airlines, with the AAI covering the remaining 10 per cent.