Pilot of Air India flight may have saved thousands of lives with final heroic act moments before crash
Niamh Shackleton
Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Bloomberg
It's thought that the pilot of the ill-fated Air India flight may have made one last heroic act before the plane crashed.
On Thursday (June 12), an Air India flight that departed from Ahmedabad started experiencing difficulties shortly after taking off.
Less than a minute after leaving the runway, the plane, believed to be a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, crashed and collided with a medical college hostel.
The ordeal has so far claimed the lives of 270 people, both from on the ground and those who were on the plane itself. Only one passenger onboard lived to tell the tale.
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One person to have died in the heartbreaking crash is dad-of-two Arjun Patoliya.
Arjun had been traveling to India to fulfil his late wife Bharti's final wish to have her ashes scattered in Gujarat. She had died two weeks earlier from cancer.
Now Arjun and Bharti's four and eight-year-old daughters have been left orphaned.
While the death toll is devastating, people have speculated that it could have been much worse had the pilot of the plane not crashed the aircraft where he did.
The Air India flight was being flown by Officer Clive Kunder and Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, both of whom had over 9,000 hours of flying experience between them, per LBC.
Just over 5km away from Ahmedabad airport is Civil Hospital Ahmedabad, a huge hospital that reportedly has over 3,000 beds in it.
But the pilot managed to avoid the hospital when it crashed, and some have suggested that he did this purposely to avoid additional casualties.
Discussing the matter on Reddit, one person penned: "Air India AI-171 crashed just 1.7 km from the Ahmedabad airport. It crashed in a somewhat loosely populated area which has doctor's hostels and mess for medical students of BJMC and Civil Hospital Ahmedabad."
"Just 400 metres north of the crash site is a civil hospital and south just adjacent to the airport wall is a high-density residential area," they went on, as per Daily Star.
Nearby is also the neighborhood of Asarva which, as of 2020, was home to 5,100 people. Had the plane crashed there, many more lives would have been lost.
There has been a lot of theories about what happened to the Air India flight that caused it to crash, but we won't know any real answers until the aircraft's black box is analyzed.
According to the BBC, the device was found on Friday (June 13). Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu, Minister of Civil Aviation of India, said finding the box marked 'an important step forward in the investigation' and that it would 'significantly aid the inquiry'.