Boeing 787 Jet Bound for London Crashes in India With 242 on Board

A Boeing 787-8 passenger jet carrying 242 people bound for London crashed in a residential area of the western Indian city of Ahmedabad shortly after takeoff on Thursday.

Air India said the flight departed Ahmedabad at 1:38 p.m. local time and was carrying 230 passengers, of whom 169 are Indian, 53 British, one Canadian and seven Portuguese nationals. 

“The injured are being taken to the nearest hospitals,” the airline said.

A member of staff at Ahmedabad Civil Hospital’s trauma center control room said the bodies of plane-crash victims were arriving at the hospital late Thursday afternoon local time, but said he had no specific details about the number of fatalities. “There are some survivors who are being treated but it’s not confirmed whether they were part of the flight or were from outside,” the hospital staff member said.

Boeing’s 787, known as the Dreamliner, entered service in October 2011 and had never had a fatal incident. 

“We are aware of initial reports and are working to gather more information,” a Boeing spokesman said. Shares in Boeing dropped sharply in premarket trading.

Thursday’s crash is a fresh blow to the planemaker, which has been mired in safety and production issues in recent years. The crash is also a rare major incident for the 787, which has enjoyed one of the best safety records in commercial aviation since its launch.

 

 

Local television channels in India showed heavy plumes of smoke rising into the sky and emergency responders carrying people away from the scene on stretchers.

The plane, which was headed to London’s Gatwick Airport, had reached an altitude of 625 feet and was traveling toward the ground at a speed of 475 feet per minute when it stopped transmitting location data, according to Flightradar24. The Boeing plane involved was 11 years old, according to the flight-tracking service.

Gujarat, where the crash took place, is the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and some of India’s most prominent business moguls and has become one of the country’s most developed states. A large proportion of the Indian diaspora comes from the western state. 

Modi said his government was offering assistance to authorities in Ahmedabad.

“It is heartbreaking beyond words. In this sad hour, my thoughts are with everyone affected by it,” Modi wrote in a post on X.

The jet crashed in a residential area of Ahmedabad from the city’s main airport, according to an official from the state police.

Air India was for decades the country’s state-run national carrier until Tata Sons, an Indian conglomerate, bought it in 2022. The Indian government had been trying for years to unload the money-losing venture. Tata has worked to modernize the airline’s fleet and improve its safety record in recent years, placing orders for over 500 new aircraft from Boeing and Airbus and upgrading its cabins and premium seats.

Before Thursday, the most recent crash involving the airline was in 2020, when a passenger plane from its budget arm Air India Express skidded off the runway and fell into a valley in the southern state of Kerala, killing at least 18 people.

Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman of Air India, wrote in a post on X that Air India flight 171 was “involved in a tragic accident today.”

The accident is the latest in a series of serious incidents in the aviation industry this year, which included a midair collision between a passenger plane and a military helicopter near Washington, D.C., in January.

Earlier this month, Boeing agreed to pay $1.1 billion to avoid prosecution for two deadly crashes of its 737 MAX jets in 2018 and 2019.

The two crashes, in Ethiopia and Indonesia, left more than 300 people dead.

The agreement with the U.S. Justice Department required the company to put $455 million toward strengthening its compliance, safety and quality programs, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on June 4.

Boeing will also give $444.5 million to the families of crash victims under a separate agreement, which was tentatively reached last month.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was monitoring the situation in Gujarat and offered his condolences to the families affected.

“The scenes emerging of a London-bound plane carrying many British nationals crashing in the Indian city of Ahmedabad are devastating,” he said.

Write to Shan Li at shan.li@wsj.com