Ahmedabad: A single black box from Air India Flight AI-171 was pulled from the wreckage on June 13, 2025, even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi convened a crisis meeting to steer relief work at Ahmedabad airport.
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner plummeted into the Meghaninagar neighbourhood, barely half a minute into a London-bound climb, killing all but one of the 242 people aboard.
Investigators, led by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau and backed by teams from N.T.S.B. and elsewhere, regard the newly recovered recording—whether cockpit voice or flight data—as crucial to explaining the tragic plunge.
Modi soon toured the hospital wards, where he spoke with sole survivor Vishwash Kumar Ramesh and with injured medical students who had rushed to help. He gathered union ministers and senior officials at the airport to coordinate immediate relief and inquiry responses.
A crippled jetliner smashed into a BJ Medical College hostel, killing eight people on the ground, five of them medical students. Rescuers, whom the Army and the National Disaster Response Force deployed, eventually lifted 265 bodies from the wreckage.
Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu called the black box the centrepiece of any crash inquiry and vowed that its data would help piece together the aircraft’s last moments. The phrase ‘crucial step’ is Naidu’s signature expression when the investigation becomes tense.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi labelled the scene heartbreaking beyond words. He promised that every affected family would receive the full support of the central government.
Two Twitter feeds, @MeghUpdates and @TheNewIndian_In, soon confirmed that technicians had retrieved the cockpit recorder, even after Air India dismissed earlier rumours as speculation. Most media follow-ups now refer to the device in the past tense.
The flight manifest included 169 Indian nationals, 53 Britons, 7 Portuguese, and 1 Canadian passenger; a former Gujarat chief minister, Vijay Rupani, was aboard. DNA sampling began within hours so families could be matched to remains, a gruesome but necessary task.
Against that grim backdrop, investigators cling to the black box’s data stream as a ticket to understanding one of India’s worst aviation tragedies. The nation grieves while aviation safety experts start draughting measures to curtail the odds of a repeat calamity.
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