Air India pilot, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, has been hailed a ‘hero’ after diverting the doomed flight AI171 at the last second to swerve a block of flats.
As many as 270 bodies have been recovered from the site of Thursday’s crash in the city of Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat – but the death toll could have been much higher.
All 18 families in the three-storey building under the flight path could have been killed as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner suffered a loss of engine thrust after take-off.
With feet to spare, Captain Sabharwal managed to divert the jet towards a patch of grassland.
Geeta Patni, 48, who was one of the closest residents to the crash site, told the Sun: ‘The building was shaking. We were so scared.
‘There was chaos in the street and fire and smoke. Any closer and we would have died. The pilot saved us.
‘We have always worried this might happen because the planes go over so low.’
Another resident, Jahanvi Rajput, 28, stressed that it is thanks to Captain Sabharwal’s ‘heroic’ efforts – in the last few moments of his life – that the residents are alive.
He said: ‘Thanks to the pilot Captain Sabharwal, we survived. He’s a hero. It is because of him we are alive.
‘The green space next to us was visible to him and that’s where he went.’
Mother-of-two Chancal Bai, 50, said: ‘If the plane had crashed into this residential area, there would have been hundreds more victims.’
Captain Sabharwal, had called his family from the airport, assuring them that he would phone them once he lands. But that call never came.
His final transmission was to air traffic control, moments before the flight went down, engulfed in a fireball from the 90 tons of fuel in its engines.
The pilot had logged more than 8,200 hours in the cockpit according to the Indian aviation regulator DGCA.
Colleagues paid tribute to Captain Sabharwal, describing him as ‘a good, quiet person.’
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