In a chilling twist that’s being called a miracle, a single passenger rose from the ashes and walked away from the wreckage of Air India Flight 171 – a catastrophe that has claimed the lives of at least 241 people.
In one of the deadliest aviation disasters in recent Indian history, more than 200 people lost their lives when an Air India flight crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad on June 12.
The London-bound Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, carrying 242 people including passengers and crew, had taken off at 1:38 p.m. local time, and slammed into a medical college campus just minutes after leaving Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport.
Images from the crash site show surreal devastation: fragments of the aircraft strewn across rooftops, burned-out classrooms, charred bodies carried from the streets, and – most jarring of all – a large section of the aircraft’s tail embedded in a collapsed wing of the college building.