The death toll of the Air India plane crash has risen to at least 274, as investigators continued to comb through the wreckage.
Another body was recovered from beneath the wing of the plane.
The 227-tonne plane crashed into a hostel where medical students and their families were living. All but one of the 242 people on board were killed in one of India’s worst aviation disasters in decades.
Of the 242 passengers and crew on board the Air India plane, 169 were Indian nationals, 53 were British, seven were Portuguese, and one was Canadian.
The collision with the hostel also killed at least three student doctors and one doctor’s wife who was heavily pregnant, as well as several labourers and vendors working in the area.
Families of the victims continued to gather at the Civil hospital in Ahmedabad where the dead were brought, as anger and frustration grew at the delay in handing over the bodies of their loved ones.
Authorities emphasised that the task of identifying people, whose bodies may have been heavily charred or dismembered from the force of the crash, was a complex task, slowing down the process of returning the victims to their families.
The sole surviving passenger, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, whose escape from death was widely described as a “miracle” by experts, remained in hospital in Ahmedabad under observation but was said to be recovering.
Dr Gameti, of Ahmedabad Civil hospital, said that Ramesh was “doing very well and will be ready to be discharged any time soon.”
Tributes were being made to the passengers who died on the Air India flight bound for London Gatwick airport that crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad in western India as names of more crash victims emerged.
Here are some of those reported to have died include Ajay Kumar Ramesh; brother of the lone survivor, Dr Prateek Joshi, Komi Vyas and three young children; twin boys Nakul and Pradyut, aged five, and daughter, Miraya, eight, Akeel Nanabawa, Hannaa Vorajee and their daughter, Sara, four, Fiongal and Jamie Greenlaw-Meek, Adam and Hasina Taju and their son-in-law, Altafhusen Patel, Javed and Mariam Syed, and their two children, Zayn, five, and Amani, four.
Air India Captain Sent Mayday Less Than Minute Before Crash
“Mayday, mayday,” was the final radio message sent by the pilot of the Air India 171 flight bound for London, moments before it crashed to the ground.
In a briefing by India’s aviation authorities, authorities confirmed that Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, who was piloting the flight, sent a distress call to air traffic control less a minute after it took off from Ahmedabad airport at 1:39pm on Thursday, June 12, 2025.
Samir Kumar Sinha, a Secretary for India’s aviation ministry disclosed that when air traffic control responded to the pilot’s emergency mayday call, “there was no response.” He said that the plane went down seconds later.
Sinha revealed that initial investigations had shown the plane had reached a height of 650ft after takeoff, after which it began to rapidly descend and hit the ground in Meghani Nagar, 2km from Ahmedabad airport.
Indian aviation authorities would not be drawn into conjecture on the cause of the crash of the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, which has been the source of global speculation, but emphasised that “every theory going around about the crash will be looked at.”
Sinha said that the flight data recorder, known as the black box, had been recovered and was being looked into by investigators.
A complete assessment of the incident would be completed within three months.
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