‘Mayday Call at 1:39 PM, Then Rapid Altitude Loss’: Aviation Ministry on Air India Crash Timeline

‘Mayday Call at 1:39 PM, Then Rapid Altitude Loss’: Days after India experienced one of its worst aviation disasters, a disturbing audio message was recorded from the cockpit of Air India Flight AI-171. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner destined for London, crashed seconds after departing from Ahmedabad airport on Thursday killing at least 274 people including passengers, crew, and people on the surface below.

Just moments prior to the plane crashing into the residential quarters of a medical college in Meghaninagar, the senior-most pilot, and captain, Sumit Sabharwal sent a short distress call to the Ahmedabad Air Traffic Control (ATC).

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The five-second message hints at the horror the pilot is living through. In the audio, the pilot can be heard exclaiming:

“MAYDAY… MAYDAY… MAYDAY… NO POWER… NO THRUST… GOING DOWN…"

On Saturday, the Ministry of Civil Aviation indicated that it had received a report of what happened on Thursday afternoon. The Civil Aviation Secretary, Samir Kumar Sinha talked about how the Ministry received the first report of the crash at about 2 pm on June 12, and this information emanated from ATC Ahmedabad minutes after it happened. The flight, AIC 171, had taken off at 1:39 pm for London Gatwick with 242 passengers and crew on board including 230 passengers, 10 cabin crew and 2 pilots. Within seconds of take-off, and after an altitude of approximately 650 feet, the aircraft began to lose height.

At that moment, the pilot had made a Mayday call and declared a full emergency with ATC. However, the controllers could not reach the aircraft again, and, exactly one minute later, the aircraft crashed in Meghaninagar, about 2 km from the runway.

Sinha noted that flight operations at Ahmedabad airport were suspended at around 2.30 pm and only partially resumed around 5.00 pm, once the emergency protocols were concluded.

Only one passenger, an Indian-origin British national, survived the crash and among the deceased was former Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani.

The crash site was a residential hostel building and it had a thick cloud of smoke hovering over it as local residents and medical students were trapped in the impact. There was a massive rescue operation.

Union Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu called the last two days “very difficult," stating that the crash near Ahmedabad airport had “shaken the entire nation."

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The minister, who reached the site, said stakeholders' response teams have already reached the site and included a contingency of police, fire rescue, ambulance and all response teams who had been working to control the flow of fire at the crash location, clear the wreckage and retrieve bodies to take to the hospital.

The minister said he hurried to the site, adding there were response teams from all departments involved, who were already on the premises, battling the fire, clearing debris, and trying to recover bodies for transfer to hospital. He also noted that the Gujarat government and the Centre were in close coordination from the beginning.

The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), which is leading the technical inquiry, was deployed immediately. Kinjarapu said the black box was recovered from the site of the crash around 5 pm on Friday. The AAIB are confident that decoding the data will provide valuable information on what happened in the moments preceding the accident.

The AAIB is optimistic that the decoding of the data will provide vital evidence of what happened in the seconds before the disaster.

As part of the wider investigation, central agencies have visited the site including the National Investigation Agency (NIA).

The Ministry of Civil Aviation confirmed the establishment of a high-level multi-disciplinary committee to investigate the cause of the crash. The committee will examine the circumstances leading to the crash and examine the existing Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)s and safety procedures currently in place.

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