The 32-Second Flight

Dreamliner's nightmare continues for the ones left behind

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THE car came to an abrupt halt in one of the lanes of Laxminagar in Meghaninagar, an innocuous neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, now synonymous with the Air India crash tragedy. The road ahead was too narrow, so we walked. At a barricade, a lone policeman was struggling to keep dozens of excited, curious onlookers at bay. “Go, but no photos or videos,” he told us. We walked some distance through an open ground. And suddenly there it was—the tail end of the giant Boeing sitting atop a building that served as a canteen for medical staff and students. At lunchtime, the aircraft dropped low and smashed into the canteen. A gut-rattling boom followed. The plane split, parts crashing into nearby homes. Fires spread fast, setting off the kitchen cylinders in a chain of blasts.

The morning after, a stillness hung heavy over Meghaninagar. The Boeing’s tail section remained bizarrely perched atop the mess, as if frozen in time. Its crumpled wings drooped like those of a grounded bird. Smoke curled up from the broken walls. The structure, though battered, hadn’t collapsed. We tilted the camera upwards. The scene was as surreal as it was brutal. Policemen rushed in, asking us to step back. The crash site, they said, was being treated like a sanctum until the black box was recovered. We obliged and stepped away.

At the barricade, a father was trying to approach the building. He had lost his son the previous day in the canteen fire. His body, identifiable, was pulled out in the evening. The father wanted to go in and collect his son’s belongings. He wanted to take pictures of his charred bike in order to claim insurance. His sobbing pleas fell on deaf ears. Dejected, he turned back.