Black box found in hunt for disaster clues

INVESTIGATORS are probing the final moments of the London-bound passenger jet that crashed shortly after take-off, killing around 250 people.

- By Stephen Beech

A black box data recorder has been recovered from the Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner that came down in a residential part of Ahmedabad en route to Gatwick on Thursday.

All bar one of the 230 passengers and 12 crew on board Flight 171 – fully loaded with fuel for a 10-hour flight – were killed including 53 British citizens.

At least eight people on the ground also died when the jet crashed into a building used as accommodation for doctors at a medical college. Rescue teams with sniffer dogs were combing the wreckage site yesterday.

Investigators will now analyse the data from the black box, which holds key information that will help to reveal what went wrong.

India’s civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said: “The flight data recorder has been recovered within 28 hours. This marks an important step forward in the investigation. This will significantly aid the inquiry into the incident.”

It comes as heartbreaking details of those on board continue to emerge.

Two young sisters, aged four and eight, lost both of their parents in the space of 18 days.

Their mother, Bharti Patoliya, had recently died from cancer. And, fulfilling her final wish, her husband Arjun, from Harrow, North West London, travelled to India to scatter her ashes in her homeland in Gujarat.

He was on his way home when tragedy struck. A GoFundMe appeal for their orphaned daughters had last night raised more than £135,000.

Shri Rajrajeshwar Guruji, who leads the Siddhashram Shakti Centre in Harrow, revealed a couple had died in the crash after losing their son in a previous aviation tragedy. They were returning from a religious celebration in India. Their son, a pilot, died in France several years earlier.