Air India Plane Crash: One Miracle, One Survivor, And One Family's Final Photo

Sometimes you miss a flight and curse the traffic. Other times, traffic saves your life.

That was the case for a young woman who never made it onto Air India Flight AI171—the same flight that erupted into flames just 30 seconds after takeoff from Ahmedabad. She was stuck on the expressway, eyes darting between his cab’s slow crawl and the time on her phone. Now, she says she’ll never complain about gridlock again.

The plane—packed with 242 souls headed for London—suffered what investigators call a catastrophic failure during climb. Power dipped. The landing gear never retracted. Flaps lifted too early. In less than a minute, the 787 Dreamliner dropped like a wounded bird straight into the BJ Medical College hostel, igniting chaos on the ground.

One man, 40-year-old Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, survived. Seated in 11A, he says he remembers “a huge jolt, like the earth got pulled from under us,” and then darkness. He came to under a slab of wreckage, coughing, bloody, but alive. “I don’t know why I was spared,” he told reporters from his hospital bed. “But I remember every sound.”

That sound still rings in the ears of emergency workers, many of whom rushed to the scene without knowing what had happened. More than 60 people on the ground were injured, and at least 24 died when the hostel collapsed. Families in the U.K., India, Portugal and Canada are grieving.

Ramesh was the only person on board to survive. The death toll was 241 passengers.

Then there’s the selfie. A young family of five from Rajasthan, mom, dad, and three little ones, smiling at the camera just before boarding. I’ve seen that photograph more times than I will admit. They were excited, hopeful. A new life in London awaited. The children wore oversized backpacks. You can almost hear the squeals and cackles.

That image hit me harder than most. Maybe because I have kids of my own. Or maybe because, deep down, we all know that final moments rarely come with warning signs.

People always talk about fate like it's a storybook thing—some cosmic hand steering the wheel. But what if fate is messier than that? A missed flight, a chance seat change, a crew member’s last-minute substitution. Details that feel trivial until they’re not.

Investigators say this is the deadliest crash involving a Boeing 787. It's also India’s worst air disaster in nearly three decades. And yet, within the wreckage, people still found ways to help. A fireman pulled four hostel students from debris using nothing but his hands. A nurse from a nearby clinic sprinted to the site barefoot, holding nothing but gauze and guts.

If there’s anything to hold onto here, maybe it’s that—the reflex to care, to show up when it’s hell outside.

And to never, ever take traffic for granted.