More than 200 people were killed when an Air India plane carrying 242 passengers crashed on Thursday just minutes after taking off from the western city of Ahmedabad bound for London, authorities said, in the world's worst air disaster in a decade.
The plane crashed in a residential area and hit a medical school dormitory outside the airport during a lunch break. It was flying to Gatwick Airport, south of the British capital.
City police chief GS Malik told Reuters that 204 bodies had been recovered from the crash site so far. Malik said the bodies found could include both passengers and people killed on the ground.
"There appear to be no survivors" among the 242 passengers on board the fatal flight, Malik told AFP. Meanwhile, the Indian news agency ANI reported two survivors from the flight, citing police and emergency services.
The plane was carrying 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese nationals and a Canadian national. The passengers included 217 adults, 11 children and two infants, Air India said.
Relatives have been asked to provide DNA samples to identify those who died, said state health secretary Dhananjay Dwivedi.
According to air traffic control at Ahmedabad airport, the plane took off at 13:39 pm local time from runway 23. It sent a "Mayday" call, signaling an emergency, but did not make any further contact after that.
Flightradar24 also said it received the last signal from the plane a few seconds after takeoff.
The British Foreign Office said on its website that Britain was working with Indian authorities to urgently establish the facts of the accident and provide support to those involved.
American aviation safety consultant Anthony Brickhouse said one troubling sign from the footage of the plane crash was that the landing gear was lowered during the flight phase, when it should normally have been raised.
"If you didn't know what was going on, you would think the plane was approaching the runway," Brickhouse said.
Deadliest plane crashes
The last air disaster in India occurred in 2010. An Air India plane flying from Dubai crashed while landing in Bangalore in the south of the country, killing 158 passengers. Eight people managed to escape from the wreckage.
In 1996, Saudi Arabian Airlines Flight 763 collided mid-air with Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907 near New Delhi. 349 people died on both planes, making it the deadliest plane crash in history.
Since 2000, there have been six air crashes worldwide, each with more than 200 deaths.
The most recent occurred in April 2018, when an Algerian military plane crashed shortly after takeoff from a base in southern Algeria, killing 257 people, mostly soldiers and their family members.
The accident in India came at the height of the country's air travel boom. The continued growth of the Indian economy and its growing middle class have transformed the country of more than 1,4 billion people into the world's third-largest domestic air travel market after the United States and China.
Photo: EPA/SIDDHARAJ SOLANKI
