How fatal the Air India Crash smashed, dreams and entire families outdated | aviation

Ahmedabad, India – April was a month answered for the Patel family.

The news arrived in a simple e -mail: her son Sahil Patel had won a Visa lottery. He was one of 3,000 Indians who were selected by a random ballot for a sought-after two-year work visa in Great Britain as part of the India Young Professionals program of the British government.

For the 25-year-old from a bourgeois family, it was a way from a modest house in Sarod Village, 150 km from Ahmedabad, the largest city in the West Indian state of Gujarat, to a new life in London. For his family, the visa was the highlight of every prayer, an opportunity for social mobility, for which they had worked all their lives.

But less than two months later this excitement turned into grief: Sahil was one of the 241 people in Air India 171, the died when the aircraft fell into the hostel of a medical college outside of Ahmedabad Airport on Thursday, for seconds.

Only one passenger survived India’s most fatal aviation disaster for more than three decades. Dozens of local people were killed, including several students at the BJ Medical College, when the plane broke out into a fireball after falling into her chaos. Some others were injured, many of them are still critical.

The students killed on board include young students on the way to London about scholarships, a family who returned home from a wedding in Gujarat, another who visited India for oath, and those like Sahil, whose families believed they had won the happiness of their lives.

“Why my child?”

In the measurement hall of the oldest medical faculty Gujarats, Rakesh Deora ended his lunch together with more than 70 other medical students. From a small town in Bhavnagar in the southeast of Gujarat, Deora was in the second year of his studies – but friends and family did not like to remember his white coat.

When the plane hit the building, it was killed by the falling rubble. In the following chaos, many of the body – from the plane and on the ground – were charred beyond recognition. Deora’s face was still recognizable when his family saw his body.

Another family hurried in the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, five hours after the crash. The 22 -year -old Irfan was a member of Air India Cabin Crew, his uniform a symbol of pride for his family. They hurried to the corpse hall and did not know what they put in front of them. When an official Irfan’s father showed his son’s body – his face still recognizable – the serenity of the man broke.

He collapsed against a wall, his voice a raw complaint to God. “I was religious all my life,” he and his words reverberated in the sterile hallway. “I gave the charity organization, I taught my son character … Why this punishment about him? Why my child?”

Next to him, Irfan’s mother refused to believe that her son was dead. “NO!” She screamed at everyone who came closer. “He promised that he would see me if he came back. You lying. It’s not him.”

For another family, the recognition did not come from a face, but from a small golden trailer. It was a gift from a husband to his wife, Syed Nafized Bano, and it was the only way to identify her. Nafisa was one of four members of the SYED family on board, including her husband Syed Inayat Ali and her two small children, Taskin Ali and Waqee Ali. They were full of excitement and spoke about their return to London after spending wonderful two months in India to celebrate Eid al-Adha with their relatives. On Thursday, her family in Gujarat crowded together in the funeral corridor in the hospital corridor, the laugh you had shared with memories.

“God saved us, but he took so many others”

Rikshaw driver Rajesh Patel was waiting for his next customer just 500 meters from the main fellocraine. The 50-year-old was the only earner in his family. It was not affected by ruins, but was the brutal heat of the explosion that devoured him in flames. He is now in an intensive care unit and fights for his life. His wife sits outside the room, her hands have caught in prayer.

In the narrow streets of the Meghaninagar district near the crash site, Tara Ben had just done her morning work and was a break.

The sudden, deafening roar that shaken the sheet metal roof of her house sounded like a gas cylinder explosion, a familiar danger in the densely packed neighborhood. But the screams from outside, which followed, told her that it was different. “Aryy, aa to plane chhhe! Plan Tooti gayo! [Oh, it’s an aeroplane! It’s a plane crash!]A man screamed in Gujarati; His voice was put together with a terror that she had never heard of before. Tara Ben ran into chaos. The air was thick with smoke and smell that it could not place – Akrid and metallic.

When she joined the crowd to see the crash site, a cold fear about her – a mixture of gratitude and guilt. It was not only for the victims, but for their own community. She looked back at the labyrinth of provisional houses in her neighborhood, where hundreds of families stacked on the other. “If it had fallen here,” she said later, her voice hardly whispered, “there would be no one to count the body anymore. God saved us, but he took so many others.”

The experienced ambulance Tofiq Mansuri has often seen tragedies, but nothing prepared him for it, he said. For four hours in the afternoon to the sun, he and his team worked in the shadow of the smoldering wrecks to recover the dead. “The morality was high at first,” remembered Mansuri, his gaze away, his face was etched before exhaustion. “They go to a mode. They are there to do a job. They focus on the task.”

He described lifting body bags for the body pocket in the ambulance. But then they found them. A small child, not older than two or three years old, her tiny body, who is charred from the inferno. At that moment, the professional wallmanuri had built to deal with the dead.

“We are trained for this, but how can you train for it?” He asked, his voice broke for the first time. “A little girl to see … a baby … it just broke us. The ghosts were gone. We were only men who wore a child who would never go home.”

Mansuri knows that the sight will stay with him. “I will not be able to sleep many nights,” he said and shook his head.

“Air India killed him”

At 7 p.m., five hours after the crash, the ambulances arrived in a dark procession in the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, not with sirens, but in an almost narrow parade of the dead.

In the hospital, every time the doors of the corpse were opened, a wave of fear through the crowd turned. In a corner, a woman’s voice rose over DIN, a sharp, penetrating allocation cry. “Air India killed him!” She screamed. “Air India killed my only son!” Then she collapsed into a bunch on the cold floor. Nobody hurried to help; They just watched, everyone fought with their own grief.

Dozens of families were waiting – that a name on a familiar face was called on a list, waiting for information that could anchor them in the middle of a disorienting nightmare. They urged themselves in small, broken circles, strangers who were united by a unique, unbearable fate. Some were called into small, sterile rooms to give DNA samples to identify their dead relatives.

Then the announcement of an official was cut through the air: identified remains would only be published after 72 hours after the mortem procedure.

When the night deepened, some relatives started, exhausted and emotionally spent, their journey home and left one or two family members back to keep vigilance. But many refused to go. They sat on the floor, her back against the wall, her eyes free.

While some families still adhere to the fragile survival, as with Rajesh Patel, the RiScha driver, others have different ways of grief.

Sahil Patel’s father Salim Ibrahim was not in his village, calm and composed outside the hectic chaos of the hospital. His voice does not break on the phone, but remained restless, his grief masked by a single practical question.

“Will you give us back to us in a closed box?” he asked. “I can only … I can’t bear anyone to see him like this. I want him to be brought home with dignity.”

The visa that Sahil promised a new world is now a worthless piece of paper. The plane was a Dreamliner, a plane that was supposed to wear. The dream of London has dissolved in a corpse show house for a nightmare. And in the end, everything a father can ask for his son can ask the mercy of a closed lid.