One year ago, Air India Flight 171 fell out of the sky barely 30 seconds after takeoff, killing 241 of the 242 people on board and others on the ground. HT reporter, among the first journalists at the scene, spent that afternoon at Ahmedabad’s Civil Hospital — and met the man in seat 11A. An account:
I was in Gandhinagar on the morning of June 12, 2025, waiting outside a senior government official’s office for a meeting. His staff had asked me to wait a few minutes. While I waited, a news alert flashed on my phone about a plane crash in Ahmedabad. My editor called, and I told him I was heading to the scene. In that moment, the official’s PA came out and said, ‘I could go in.’ I apologised and rushed out.
ALSO READ | Everything was normal, until it wasn’t: The 32-second mystery of AI 171 crash in Ahmedabad
As I left, I texted the official to explain why. He replied that he was watching it happen on television.
I couldn’t make sense of it. My first assumption was that it must be a small aircraft, or that there had been some misunderstanding. Driving towards Ahmedabad, I made a few calls, and the misunderstanding I had hoped for dissolved quickly. It was Air India Flight AI-171, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner bound for London’s Gatwick airport. The flight had gone down at 1.38 pm, barely half a minute after taking off from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport. It was carrying 242 people — passengers and crew. Air India would later confirm that 169 of the 230 passengers were Indian nationals, 53 British, seven Portuguese and one Canadian.
The wing under my feet
I reached the spot around 2.45 pm. The aircraft had come down in Meghani Nagar, a densely populated residential neighbourhood less than two kilometres from the airport’s runway. The area was swarming with police and security personnel, and thick smoke blocked the view.
I spotted a senior government official at the site and approached him. He told me that, from what he had been told, the plane had first clipped a tree before striking a hostel building — the BJ Medical College resident doctors’ hostel, where many young doctors and medical staff lived. When I asked about casualties and survivors, he said nothing was clear at that point. I looked down and realised I was standing on one of the wings of the aircraft.
There was a buzz among journalists that former Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani was on the plane. I asked the official if he had heard the same. He said he had, but that nothing was confirmed. I tried calling Sailesh Mandliya, Rupani’s former PA, but got no answer.
I spoke to bystanders who had witnessed the crash. A man who ran a courier office near the site said he initially thought it was a bomb blast. It was not hard to understand why, given that a bomb had exploded at the nearby Civil Hospital in July 2008.
The Dreamliner had been carrying approximately 1,25,000 litres of fuel — enough for a ten-hour flight to London — when it went down. The resulting fireball was visible from several kilometres away. After I had spoken to a few more people, the police began cordoning off the entire area. I spotted a senior police official I knew; he was watching a video on someone’s phone while another officer tried to zoom in on it. He told me the footage was confidential.
I later learned that it had been shot by a teenager and showed the RAT — the ram air turbine, a small emergency propeller that deploys to power a plane when it loses engine or electrical power — in the aircraft’s final seconds. Firefighters were working to douse the flames, and ambulances moved in and out continuously.
ALSO READ | One year of Air India crash that killed 260: No cause, no closure
The lists on the wall
Civil Hospital, Ahmedabad — one of Asia’s largest public hospitals — had by then become the city’s central point for the crash’s aftermath.
When I arrived, the smell hit me immediately. Hundreds of people had gathered and there was barely room to move. Getting into the morgue was nearly impossible given the crowd.
The scale of what had happened was beginning to settle. All 242 people on board were feared dead. The plane had also ploughed into the BJ Medical College mess at lunchtime, killing several people on the ground — resident doctors, nurses, staff, people who had simply sat down for a meal. The sirens of ambulances and police vehicles drowned out the cries of those gathered outside.
Near the gate, a woman in her 40s came rushing towards me, her husband beside her. They asked if I knew where the injured were being kept, and where they could find a doctor. I tried calling a few doctors I knew at the hospital but got no answer. I told them to come with me and took them to where patients were being treated. A doctor there said there were no crash victims in that ward and directed them to the other side of the hospital. He added that a list of the injured had been posted on the walls outside the wards, and that they should check there.
The couple checked the list. A doctor then told them that if the name was not there, they should try the morgue. On hearing this, the woman broke down. I asked her husband whom they were looking for. He said it was her sister, who had been on the London flight. Seeing her state, I could not bring myself to ask for more. I stopped myself from taking out my notebook.
I turned to leave that ward and, almost immediately, in the corridor, ran into Sailesh Mandliya — Rupani’s former PA, the man I had been trying to reach all afternoon. As soon as he saw me, I told him I had been trying to reach him. He said nothing. Just broke down, there in the corridor. I did not need to ask anything more.
Mandliya composed himself after a moment and said he was going from ward to ward looking for the former CM. “If you find out something, let me know,” he said before walking on and disappearing into the crowd. There was nothing more to say. The answer, I sensed, was already written somewhere on those lists on the wall.
Rupani’s family would confirm his death later that evening, when BJP leaders, including Union minister CR Paatil, broke the news.
I climbed a few floors and reached the trauma ward. Inside, young interns were treating patients. I asked if any crash victims were there. One doctor said yes — everyone on the right side of the ward was from the crash. I could spot three or four of them. I asked if they had been on the plane. He said no; they were victims from the ground.
I spoke to a father whose daughter had suffered multiple fractures. She was a nurse at the Civil Hospital and had gone to the hostel mess for lunch with a friend and the friend’s brother, a doctor. She had jumped from the third floor at the moment of impact and was injured; her friend, who took the stairs, escaped unhurt. The Boeing had come in at a shallow angle, and the mess, which occupied the lower floors of the hostel building, bore the full force of the crash and the burning fuel that followed.
Union home minister Amit Shah, who arrived in Ahmedabad, that evening said the temperatures from the burning fuel had left no chance of rescue inside the building and had made identification of the bodies difficult.
In the next bed was an autorickshaw driver with bone injuries and minor burns. He said he had come to drop passengers nearby and had turned towards the hostel when a massive explosion threw his rickshaw over and injured him.
In the bed beside him lay a young man who seemed upset with the hospital administration and kept saying the facilities needed to be upgraded. I asked the attending doctor who he was. Another young intern said he had been in the plane crash.
By this point, Ahmedabad police commissioner GS Malik — now the state’s Director General of Police — had told the media that there was no chance of any survivor from the flight. Two hundred and forty-two people on board, a fully fuelled wide-body jet, a fireball that had burned for hours: the statement was not unreasonable.
Seat 11A
I asked the young man before me if he had been on the plane. He nodded, then closed his eyes. He was in shorts, bare-chested. I asked the doctor again to confirm. The intern said the man had mild physical injuries — impact injuries to his chest, eyes and feet — but was otherwise fit.
I introduced myself as a journalist and said I would like to speak with him. He looked at me and turned away. I started to leave. Then he called out and asked if I had an iPhone charger. I carry a sling bag with a charger, books, pens and documents. I gave it to him, and he asked me to put his phone somewhere safe to charge.
When I asked if we could talk, he said his head was spinning and asked me to let him rest. I asked how he had managed to escape. He replied that he had been on the plane, that within about 30 seconds there was a loud noise, and the plane crashed. He had been thrown out. He closed his eyes again.
I gave him back his phone once it had charged a little. He made a call that appeared to be to his father — he said he was fine — and then I stopped trying to listen.
Shortly after, a young man and a woman came to meet him. They spoke briefly and left in a hurry. I asked if they knew him. They said they were from Diu, that he too was from Diu, and that they were going to check on others from there.
Diu, the Union territory on Gujarat’s southern coast, had 15 people with roots to the place on the flight. Many members of its community settled in the UK had been on board, returning home after visiting family in India.
I called my editor and told him I may have met a survivor, but I wasn’t sure yet, and would update once I find out more.
Then the man lying in front of me looked over again and asked to borrow the charger one more time. I told him to go ahead, but reminded him I had work to do. I placed the phone on charge behind him, at a vacant bed with a charging point. He asked me to make sure no one took it. I said not to worry. Then he asked what I wanted to know, and where I was from.
He told me again what he remembered. Thirty seconds after takeoff, there was a loud noise and the plane crashed. The next thing he knew, he was outside, with pieces of the plane and bodies around him.
Scared, he stood up and ran until someone grabbed hold of him and put him in an ambulance to the hospital. He had been seated in 11A — an emergency exit row. Police commissioner Malik would later confirm to the media that the survivor was in seat 11A.
When doctors came to check him, they asked him to empty his pockets. He took out his wallet. Then he removed his boarding pass. That was when I knew for certain.
His name was Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, 40, a British national who had lived in London for about two decades. Originally from Diu, his wife and child also lived in London.
He pointed to his passport, which was also in his pocket. I asked if I could photograph the plane ticket, and he agreed. Then I asked if I could take a picture of him, and he nodded.
For a brief moment, it reminded me of M. Night Shyamalan’s film Unbreakable — the idea of one man walking away from a disaster like this — but the thought did not hold.
Vishwash then asked if I was going to check the other rooms in the hospital for more survivors. I said I would. He said, “Please look for my brother, Ajay Kumar Ramesh. He was with me. We visited Diu together and were going back to the UK. He was travelling with me and I don’t know where he is. Please find him. I am waiting here.”.
Ajay, he said, had been seated in a different row from Vishwash when the plane went down.
He kept closing his eyes as he spoke, each pause stretching under the weight of what he had lived through — as if keeping them open was the only thing holding the moment together, and shutting them might let it all collapse again.
I sent the editors photographs of the boarding pass and of Ramesh, and started filing the story from my phone. Vishwash kept saying, “Please find my brother. I am right here.”
Soon after, commissioner Malik had confirmed to the media that there was one survivor. One, out of 242.
I wanted to go back and tell Ramesh how fortunate he was — but that would also mean telling him his brother had not made it. The crash had killed all 241 others on board. It had killed people on the ground who had simply been eating lunch. The woman searching for her sister would be devastated by now, I thought. I could not find the courage to go back in and say any of that.
So I stepped outside the hospital campus. In the noise, and the grief that was only beginning to take shape. I did not want to go back in.
