- Crash occurs minutes after taking off at 1:39pm local time.
- Plane involved in incident was Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner.
- No response from aircraft after “mayday” call: air traffic control.
An Air India plane headed to London with more than 240 people on board crashed near the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in India’s western city of Ahmedabad, minutes after taking off from India’s Ahmedabad on Thursday, the airline and police said, without specifying whether there were any fatalities.
The plane was headed to Gatwick airport in the UK, Air India said, while police officers said it crashed in a civilian area near the airport.
Aviation tracking site Flightradar24 said the plane was a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, one of the most modern passenger aircraft in service.
“At this moment, we are ascertaining the details and will share further updates,” Air India said on X.
The crash occurred when the aircraft was taking off, television channels reported. One channel showed the plane taking off over a residential area and then disappearing from the screen before a huge cloud of fire rising into the sky from beyond the houses.
Visuals also showed debris on fire, with thick black smoke rising up into the sky near the airport. They also showed visuals of people being moved in stretchers and being taken away in ambulances.
A total of 242 people were on board the flight, news agency ANI reported, citing Gujarat state’s police control room.
India’s CNN News18 TV channel, however, said there were 220 passengers and 12 crew on the plane.
According to air traffic control at Ahmedabad airport, the aircraft departed at 1:39pm local time (0809 GMT) from runway 23. It gave a “Mayday” call, signalling an emergency, but thereafter no there was no response from the aircraft.
Flightradar24 also said that it received the last signal from the aircraft seconds after it took off.
“The aircraft involved is a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner with registration VT-ANB,” it said.
Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The last fatal plane crash in India involved Air India Express, the airline’s low-cost arm.
The airline’s Boeing-737 overshot a “table-top” runway at Kozhikode International Airport in southern India in 2020. The plane skidded off the runway, plunging into a valley and crashing nose-first into the ground and killing 21 people.
Shares of planemaker Boeing slid in premarket US trading on Thursday after the plane crash in Ahmedabad that involved a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner.
Boeing shares fell 7.8% to $197.3 in premarket trading. It was not immediately clear what caused the crash.
This is a developing story and is being updated with more details
