The teenager who filmed the Air India crash has said he would not ‘sit on a plane’ again after witnessing the disaster.
Aryan Ansari, 17, was standing on a terrace of a three-storey building to film the Boeing 787 on his phone as it left Ahmedabad airport on Thursday afternoon, in order to show his friends ‘how planes fly.’
He captured the doomed flight AI 171 bound for London Gatwick as it smashed into the ground before exploding in a ball of fire less than a minute after taking to the sky.
The disaster claimed the lives of all but one of 242 people on board, 53 of whom were British.
The lone survivor, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, was in seat 11A when he managed to escape from the burning wreckage.
Aryan was visiting his father in Gujarat with his sister when he and Raj Singh, 16, observed planes at the airport.
Despite having dreams of flying, Aryan said he was put off setting foot on an aircraft after watching the disaster unfold before his eyes.
He told local media that he thought the aircraft was attempting to land before realising it was crashing.
‘I came here on June 12. The plane was passing very close, so I thought of shooting a video to show to my friends’, the teenager said.
‘The plane went downwards, and I thought it was going to land as the airport was nearby.
‘But when it went down, flames started shooting up, and I saw that it had exploded. I was scared. I showed the video to my sister. I also told my father about it.’
Officials are still trying to ascertain the final death toll and continue to match DNA samples to identify victims’ bodies.
Some 30 victims had been identified using DNA samples provided by relatives, authorities confirmed.
Vigils to honour the dead have taken place in both the UK and India.
An investigation into the cause of the crash is ongoing involving India’s Air Accident Investigation Bureau and the US National Transportation Safety Board.
Air India has been ordered to inspect its Boeing 787-8 and Boeing 787-9 fleet as a ‘preventive measure’.
The Dreamliner involved in the crash had been delivered to the airline in 2014 and had flown between Ahmedabad and London Gatwick 25 times in the last two years.
The last words picked up by air traffic control from a panicked flight deck were ‘Thrust not achieved. Falling. Falling. Mayday. Mayday.’
One of the two black boxes has been discovered, although authorities have yet to say whether it was the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder.
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