Search and recovery teams continued scouring the site of one of India’s worst aviation disasters for a third day after the Air India flight fell from the sky and killed at least 270 people in Gujarat state, officials said yesterday.
The London-bound Boeing 787 on Thursday struck a medical college hostel in a residential area of the northwestern city of Ahmedabad minutes after takeoff, killing 241 people on board and at least 29 on the ground. One passenger survived.
Recovery teams working until late on Friday found at least 25 more bodies in the debris, officials said.
Photo: AFP
Dhaval Gameti, a doctor at the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad, said the facility had received 270 bodies.
The lone surviving passenger was still under observation for some of his wounds, Gameti said.
“He is doing very well and will be ready to be discharged any time soon,” Gameti said yesterday.
Hundreds of relatives of the crash victims have provided DNA samples at the hospital. Most bodies were charred or mutilated, making them unrecognizable.
Some relatives yesterday expressed frustration that the process was taking too long.
Authorities say it normally takes up to 72 hours to complete DNA matching, and they are expediting the process.
“Where are my children? Did you recover them?” asked Rafiq Abdullah, whose nephew, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren were on the flight. “I will have to ask questions. Government is not answering these questions.”
Another relative persistently asked hospital staff when his relative’s body would be handed over to the family for last rites.
“Give us the body,” the relative said.
Investigators on Friday recovered the plane’s digital flight data recorder, or the black box, which was recovered from a rooftop near the crash site and is expected to lead to clues about the cause of the accident.
The Indian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau said it had started working with “full force” to extract the data.
The device is expected to reveal information about the engine and control settings, while the voice recorder would provide cockpit conversations, said Paul Fromme, a mechanical engineer with the UK-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
Aviation safety consultant Jeff Guzzetti, a former crash investigator for the US National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration, said investigators should be able to answer some important questions about what caused the crash as soon as next week as long as the flight data recorder is in good shape.
Investigators likely are looking at whether wing flaps were set correctly, the engine lost power, alarms were going off inside the cockpit and if the plane’s crew correctly logged information about the hot temperature outside and the weight of the fuel and passengers, Guzzetti said.
Mistakes in the data could result in the wing flaps being set incorrectly, he said.
Thursday’s Air India crash involved a 12-year-old Boeing 787. Boeing planes have been plagued by safety issues on other types of aircraft.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS