Investigators could be a step closer to unravelling the mystery of the tragic Air India Flight 171 disaster, with a vitally important tool pulled from the rubble set to help the team piece together the victims’ final moments
The team investigating the disaster of Air India Flight 171 have recovered an item which could prove to be an essential piece of the puzzle.
On Thursday, June 12, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner bound for London crashed into a medical college in a residential area, shortly after taking off in the city of Ahmedabad, Western India. Over the weekend, 270 bodies were recovered from the crash site, which was strewn with rubble and burnt-out wreckage.
It’s thought that 241 of the deceased had been passengers and members of the cabin crew, a number which included at least 50 British nationals. It’s believed the remainder of the casualties had been inside the doctors’ hostel or on the ground nearby when the plane went down.
Incredibly, one British passenger on the London-bound plane, 40-year-old Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, managed to walk away from the wreckage with relatively minor injuries, with his testimony offering a chilling insight into the horror that unfolded inside the doomed aircraft.
Now, experts believe they could be a step closer to unravelling the mystery of what happened in the sky that day after recovering the cockpit voice recorder (CVR).
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As previously reported by BBC News, the CVR captures audio from inside the cockpit, including conversations between pilots, alarms and ambient sounds. We know that Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, who heroically diverted his plane into a patch of grassland, sent out an emergency ‘Mayday’ signal shortly before the fiery collision. Now, the CVR could shed some light on what exactly prompted this final message.
On Friday (June 13), the flight data recorder (FDR), which keeps a log of important flight parameters such as altitude, speed and engine performance, was pulled from the rubble.
Collectively, the CVR and FDR form what is usually referred to as a plane’s “black box”. Crucial when it comes to investigating air crash disasters, these tools, which are designed to survive crashes, help investigators reconstruct the final moments before catastrophe and ultimately determine what went wrong.
India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) is now leading the inquiry into the cause of the tragedy, assisted by teams from the US and the UK.
So far, more than 90 victims have been identified through DNA matching. However, the condition of the bodies, some of which have had to be painstakingly reconstructed, means some families may still have a while to wait before laying their loved ones to rest.
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, whose miraculous survival has made headlines, previously told the Hindustan Times: “When the flight took off, within five to 10 seconds it felt like it was stuck in the air. Suddenly, the lights started flickering – green and white – then the plane rammed into some establishment that was there.”
The 40-year-old London-based man, who’d been sitting in seat 11A next to an emergency exit, revealed that the section of the plane he was in landed on the ground, rather than hitting the roof of a building. Those on the other side would have been trapped.
Vishwash explained: “When I saw the exit, I thought I could come out. I tried, and I did. Maybe the people who were on the other side of the plane weren’t able to.” He added, “I don’t know how I survived. I saw people dying in front of my eyes – the air hostesses, and two people I saw near me … I walked out of the rubble.”
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