'Mayday call at 1:39pm, then altitude loss within seconds': Indian aviation ministry on Air India crash

The aviation ministry on Saturday said that the pilot on the Air India flight that crashed in Ahmedabad on 12 June sent one last radio message to Air Traffic Control (ATC) at 1:39 pm – 'Mayday', reports Hindustan Times.

In a press conference, civil aviation ministry secretary Samir Kumar Sinha said that the flight, carrying 242 passengers and crew members, took off at 1:39 pm and within seconds started losing altitude.

The flight's captain, Sumeet Sabharwal, a Line Training Captain with 8,200 hours of flying experience, immediately made a Mayday call to ATC.

Mayday is an internationally recognised emergency word which is used to send a distress signal to air traffic control.

"At 1:39 pm, the pilot informed Ahmedabad ATC that it was a Mayday, i.e., full emergency. According to ATC, when it tried to contact the plane, it did not receive any response. Exactly after 1 minute, this plane crashed in Medhaninagar, which is located at a distance of about 2 km from the airport," Sinha was quoted as saying by ANI news agency.

He further said that before the crash, the plane had completed the Paris-Delhi-Ahmedabad sector without any accident.

"Due to the accident, the runway was closed at 2:30 pm and after completing all the protocols, the runway of Ahmedabad was opened for limited flights from 5pm," he pointed out.

What we know about the Air India plane crash

On 12 June, Air India's Boeing 787 Dreamliner (AI 171), carrying 242 passengers and crew members, crashed into a medical hostel complex in Ahmedabad's Meghaninagar area shortly after its departure from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport.

One person survived the crash, while 241 on board were killed. Of the total passengers onboard, there were 169 Indians, 53 British, one Canadian and seven Portuguese nationals, apart from 12 crew members.

Over 20 people were killed in the medical college complex, where the doomed flight crashed.

Earlier on Friday, investigators recovered the Black box of the London-bound Air India plane from the rooftop of the medical college hostel.

Civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu has said that the black box will provide in-depth insight into what happened moments before the plane crash.