Air India Tragedies That Broke Us: A Tale of Two Crashes, Four Decades Apart

Just as the 23 June, 1985 has been written in stone, 12 of June, 2025, will be etched in the annals of aviation history, with the tragedy at the Ahmedabad airport.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

Next week marks 40 years since the Air India flight 182, Kanishka, was blown up over the Irish seas. As I make my way to Cork, Ireland, for the 40th anniversary prayers, images of that tragedy flash through my mind and heart as though it were yesterday. We all witnessed this devastating event unfold before our eyes, triggering so many dark memories.

Just as the date of 23 June, 1985 has been written in stone, 12 of June, 2025, will be etched in the annals of aviation history after the tragedy near Ahmedabad airport in Gujarat.

The 11-year-old Boeing B787 Dreamliner, registered as VT-ANB and bound for London Gatwick airport with 230 passengers and 12 crew, took off at 1:39 pm, only to drop from the sky at 635 feet onto a medical college hostel 2 km from the airport in Meghani Nagar, exploding into flames.

The Final 36 Seconds

Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, a 30-year-old veteran training captain with more than 8,000 hours of impeccable flying, was the pilot in command. Alongside him was Captain Clive Kunder, a young pilot from an aviators’ family, with 1,100 hours to his name.

The pilot issued a Mayday signal as he took off, and it was visible to most observers from the videos of the incident that the climbing aircraft had no thrust and was losing power and lift before crashing atop a medical college hostel a few seconds later.

On 15 June, the Aviation Ministry released the text of the Mayday and Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) message from the Captain, which said, “MAYDAY… MAYDAY… MAYDAY… NO POWER… NO THRUST… GOING DOWN…”

The flight was over in 36 seconds. 241 people lost their lives on the aircraft, with only one miraculous survivor who walked out of the burning plane wreck. At least 35 others have been reported dead and 70 injured or missing from the college hostel, with one miraculous survivor who walked out of the burning plane wreck.

The aircraft bound for London was heavily laden with aviation turbine fuel for the 9-hour 40-minute flight. This contributed to the weight and the ferocity of the fire that engulfed both the aircraft and the college building.

A Nation in Mourning

A few hours later, India and indeed the world, went into mourning. A visibly shaken Home Minister Amit Shah, whose electoral constituency Gandhinagar borders Ahmedabad, struggled to speak. PM Narendra Modi visited the crash site, visibly burdened. Global leaders poured in their condolences and offered help.

The plane carried 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, 7 Portuguese nationals, and one Canadian national.

Amongst the crew were Shraddha Dhavan and Aparna Mahadik, both experienced VVIP cabin supervisors who had flown prime ministers and presidents. They left behind daughters aged 10 and 13. Saineeta Chakravarthy, a 35-year-old crew member from Juhu Koliwada and an alumnus of Maneckji Cooper, who transitioned from a domestic airline to Air India, had never gotten married, to take care of her aged parents, whom she left behind.

Lamunthem Singson, 24, from Manipur, had just begun her career. Others—Roshni Songhare, a rising Instagram influencer; Manisha Thapa, KN Sharma, Maithili Patil, Irfan Shaikh, and Deepak Pathak—each leave behind grieving families.

The haunting image of the plane crashing into a medical college hostel and its rear section being lodged atop the roof will stay with all who saw it. The image of the big bird lifting off, only to enter a slow descent into the college, as the Captain fought with his own machine to try and make it glide and save more people, as it exploded into an inferno, is a scary visual I will carry with me all my life, as will millions of others.

Sadly, for AI-171, this was no “Miracle on the Hudson.” Despite the supreme skills of Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, and those passengers and crew who lived on a hope and a prayer, they were belied that afternoon.

Unseen Wounds

Having witnessed multiple crashes and air accidents over 40 years—including Kanishka, Mangalore, Kozhikode, and others—I know first-hand how traumatic these events are.

The visual identification process of bodies is perhaps the most horrific thing that families have to do.

I can so say with personal experience from the Kanishka bombing 40 years ago, as I have recounted in my book 'On Angels wings: Beyond the bombing of Air India 182.'

DNA matching in recent years has eased the burden for families to identify their loved ones, but the pain remains. The impact of a tragedy like this has multiple aspects, on the families, on the citizenry, and the pilots and crew of the airline.

The untold grief that encompasses the colleagues and airline personnel is an aspect we don’t speak about enough, but the post-traumatic stress and potential PTSD is real. The counselling and care required for those friends, colleagues, and even flyers from other airlines, is something we have not yet grasped in India, but we need to appreciate.

Our society needs to mature and accept that all of us develop deeply embedded trauma of tragic accidents like this and the sights, sounds, and smell of death will never leave us. I lost my entire family in the Air India Kanishka bombing 40 years ago and the trauma still sits deep in my psyche.

Safety or Suspicion?

There is also the fear psychosis and ultra sensitivity that enters the minds of aviation professionals after a tragedy of this magnitude, resulting in multiple faults being detected, over cautiousness in operations, and fear that this could reoccur again. Grief counselling and stricter checks are the need of the hour, along with additional crew and mentors.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has announced a series of repeat checks and line checks by Air India, and at the time of writing this, 27 of the 35 Dreamliners have cleared these checks without any finding. Some of the aircraft had been grounded earlier due to various reasons. The DGCA has acknowledged Air India’s checks and results too. Despite this, at least three instances have come about in the last two days where aircraft have turned back for some technical reason or the other.

It is not as though Air India airframe and avionics engineering are poor. On the contrary, it is amongst the best in the world and it has the element of ultra sensitivity and human cautiousness that guides every action.

Going back 40 years, there were at least 11 bomb scares in the wake of the Kanishka attack, that caused groundings and checks. Post 9/11, we saw the scrambling of fighter jets in multiple countries across the world, whenever any aircraft strayed slightly from their flight paths. Post Kozhikode, there were many landing go-arounds and instances of diversions of aircraft, during even the slightest of weather phenomena.

The caution and concern is heightened in this social media-driven world, where images of the mushroom explosion are vivid in many viewers minds, the instances replayed over and over, giving rise to many concerns.

Amidst all of this tragedy and sadness, as is their wont, TV channels began speculating a hundred different theories, ranging from sabotage to pilot error, with a sprinkling of fuel contamination in between. Desire for TRPs means truth became the casualty. Everyone had a theory that was essential to propagate their own viewpoint, especially foreign retired pilots, obviously propagating it for vested interests.

Investigations Begin

The DGCA announced that the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) would lead the probe into the crash, and the government of India also announced a high-level team of bureaucrats and police to look into the larger picture of the tragedy and give their views on the entire incident.

President Trump announced that the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) would be joining the investigation as did the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), and representatives from Boeing and engine maker GE made their way to Ahmedabad, India.

The Gujarat government, the police, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), and the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) began collecting evidence at scene and the local hospital facilitated the DNA testing of victims’ families for DNA mapping. The Black box, CVR and DFDR, were recovered from the roof of the hostel on the third day of the tragedy, and the aircraft tail itself was brought down on the fifth day of the tragedy.

A Dreamliner’s First Crash

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a modern-day wonder of an aircraft, with over 1,175 of them flying in the skies, having flown over 5 million flights, which is equivalent to 32 million hours of flying.

The millions of passengers these flights could have carried would run into 8,000 million passenger hours cumulatively, and it has done so without a single crash so far.

The AI-171 is the first tragedy of the 787 Dreamliner and will be investigated deeply, especially as the preliminary visual of most experienced engineers, aviators and experts appears that for some reason the aircraft suffered an engine event, which could even have been a dual engine failure, leading to loss of thrust and power, and deployment of the RAT.

Whether this was due to electronic, electrical, hydraulic or fuel failure, or ingestion of objects, or whether this was indeed a case of human error, we will not know until data from the black box has been thoroughly analysed and assessed and finds its way into a report.

The preliminary assessment by the AAIB should be available within a fortnight, and will be eagerly awaited the world over. Boeing has had its share of troubles in recent years and the implications are enormous for the company and the comity of airlines the world over, as an indication of a technical failure could result in investigations or even worse, groundings, for more than 1,000 aircraft worldwide, as we saw in the case of the 737 max some years ago.

The stakes are very high, and global aviation has never been in such a sensitive spot as it is at the current time.

Stories of Loss and Heartbreak

Captain Sumeet was on the verge of retiring from the airline to look after his aged father, and Captain Clive Kunder was the son of retired air hostess Rekha Kunder, and had just joined Air India. Both of their dreams turned to ashes by this cruel act of of destiny.

The horror stories of families trickled in slowly, as the entire breadth of the disaster unfolded. British wellness guru Jamie Meek and his husband Fiongal Greenlaw had posted a joyful video minutes before boarding, celebrating their visit to Gujarat and talking about how happy they were to be going back home. They died together.

Payal Khatik, the daughter of rickshaw puller Suresh Khatik, died on the flight. She was going to study in the UK and the father worked day and night to earn enough and take loans to ensure that she got a British education. Her first flight turned out to be her last.

Dr Prateek Joshi from Derbyshire perished with his wife and three children, just after posting a selfie. Another tragic story is that of Arjunbhai Manubhai Patolya, from Vaidya Gujarat, who was living in London for many years. His wife had passed away after a prolonged illness, and her last wish was for her last rites to be done in her hometown in Gujarat and ashes to be scattered there. Arjun returned to India to perform her last rites, only to perish in the flight.

Parents cried for children they had lost, children sobbed for parents who left them, the stories bore out the human distress that lay waste on the fields of BJ Medical college, where at least 40 students and doctors were eating lunch, and a host of others queued up for their meals.

For the 241 souls of AI 171, and the approximately 40 other students on the ground, life came to a full stop that day. We, as a nation, mourn their loss, and their families shall forever mourn their passing. My prayers to my friends and former colleagues at Air India.

There will be days and years to come when these families will miss their loved ones, on special occasions, or anniversaries and birthdays, and the grief of that 12 June afternoon will return and replay as though it was yesterday, I know this from my personal trauma that I experience even 40 years later. I pray that we honour and remember the victims and that they find peace.

Blue skies forever, my friends.

(The author is is an aviation analyst, lawyer, and author. He has spent 40 years in aviation and lost his family in the Air India Kanishka bombing in 1985. He can be reached at @sjlazars. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)