Air India Tragedies: A Tale of Two Crashes, Four Decades Apart


The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a modern-day wonder of an aircraft, with over 1,175 of them flying in the skies, having flown over 5 million flights, which is equivalent to 32 million hours of flying.

The millions of passengers these flights could have carried would run into 8,000 million passenger hours cumulatively, and it has done so without a single crash so far.

The AI-171 is the first tragedy of the 787 Dreamliner and will be investigated deeply, especially as the preliminary visual of most experienced engineers, aviators and experts appears that for some reason the aircraft suffered an engine event, which could even have been a dual engine failure, leading to loss of thrust and power, and deployment of the RAT.

Whether this was due to electronic, electrical, hydraulic or fuel failure, or ingestion of objects, or whether this was indeed a case of human error, we will not know until data from the black box has been thoroughly analysed and assessed and finds its way into a report.

The stakes are very high, and global aviation has never been in such a sensitive spot as it is at the current time.

Captain Sumeet was on the verge of retiring from the airline to look after his aged father, and Captain Clive Kunder was the son of retired air hostess Rekha Kunder, and had just joined Air India. Both of their dreams turned to ashes by this cruel act of of destiny.

The horror stories of families trickled in slowly, as the entire breadth of the disaster unfolded. British wellness guru Jamie Meek and his husband Fiongal Greenlaw had posted a joyful video minutes before boarding, celebrating their visit to Gujarat and talking about how happy they were to be going back home. They died together.

Dr Prateek Joshi from Derbyshire perished with his wife and three children, just after posting a selfie. Another tragic story is that of Arjunbhai Manubhai Patolya, from Vaidya Gujarat, who was living in London for many years. His wife had passed away after a prolonged illness, and her last wish was for her last rites to be done in her hometown in Gujarat and ashes to be scattered there. Arjun returned to India to perform her last rites, only to perish in the flight.

Parents cried for children they had lost, children sobbed for parents who left them, the stories bore out the human distress that lay waste on the fields of BJ Medical college, where at least 40 students and doctors were eating lunch, and a host of others queued up for their meals.

For the 241 souls of AI 171, and the approximately 40 other students on the ground, life came to a full stop that day. We, as a nation, mourn their loss, and their families shall forever mourn their passing. My prayers to my friends and former colleagues at Air India.

There will be days and years to come when these families will miss their loved ones, on special occasions, or anniversaries and birthdays, and the grief of that 12 June afternoon will return and replay as though it was yesterday, I know this from my personal trauma that I experience even 40 years later. I pray that we honour and remember the victims and that they find peace.

Blue skies forever, my friends.

(The author is is an aviation analyst, lawyer, and author. He has spent 40 years in aviation and lost his family in the Air India Kanishka bombing in 1985. He can be reached at @sjlazars. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)



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