A mysterious object has been spotted spinning away from the doomed Air India flight less than a second before it crashed down, MailOnline can reveal today.
Investigators are poring over the footage amid claims that the flying debris may have been the emergency door immediately next to the sole survivor of the Ahmedabad air disaster.
The video shows the last moments of London-bound Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner. The pilot had frantically warned in a mayday call that the plane was ‘losing power’ just moments before it crashed into a hostel, killing at least 260 people.
Immediately before it explodes into a ball of flames, a large object can be seen flying off away from the fuselage. Investigators trying to find the cause of the crash will be hunting for the item.
Experts have said they believe the large chunk of debris could be the plane’s emergency door number two – the exit right next to the crash’s only survivor: Briton Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, who was sat in seat 11A.
Vishwash escaped the disaster with cuts and bruises but his brother, on the same row, is believed to have died. He cannot remember how he got out of the wreckage but speaking from his hospital bed he believes the door next to came off when the plane struck a building on its way down.
Prof John McDermid, Lloyd’s Register chairman of safety at University of York, said Vishwash’s choice of seat was vital. It is an over-wing seat which offers greater structural strength, and right next to the emergency exit.
‘Also, being by an exit door means you can get out quickly, which greatly increases the chance of survival when there is a fire,’ he said.
The mysterious piece of debris that flew off the plane into the air is circled here just as the London-bound Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner disappeared from view and crashed
The plane came down as it appeared to lose power. The pilot made a mayday call as the jet crashed
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, from Leicester, lying in hospital with a bloodied face and injuries after the tragic crash, which claimed the life of his younger brother. He appears to be the sole survivor
Astonishing footage showed Vishwash walking away from the crash
Police said they had found a lone survivor who had been sitting in seat 11A. It is right next to emergency door number two on the Boeing Dreamliner
Edwin Galea, director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) at the University of Greenwich, said today: ‘The survivor’s seat is 11A and on the 787-8, that’s right by the number two exit’.
‘So he’s got the seat as close as you could possibly be to an emergency exit. You can’t be any closer’, he told the Telegraph.
‘It’s right on his side and he’s actually in the A seat, which is the window seat. You could reach up and touch the door, you’re that close to it.’
The pilot of the Air India crash frantically warned the plane was ‘losing power’ just moments before it crashed into a building, killing at least 260 people.
The jet plunged into the busy suburb just seconds after taking off from Ahmedabad Airport on Thursday morning, claiming the lives of all but one passenger.
Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, who had 8,200 hours of flying experience, desperately cried ‘Mayday…no thrust, losing power, unable to lift’ before the aircraft went down and hit a residential property.
Air India later confirmed that 241 of the 242 people aboard flight AI171 died in the crash.
Miracle British survivor Viswashkumar Ramesh, who was flying alongside his brother, remembers ‘a loud noise…then the plane crashed’.
The Boeing was not much more than 400ft above ground when the two experienced pilots onboard apparently lost power in both engines.
They then had 17 agonising seconds to wrestle with the controls before their state-of-the-art plane smashed into a medical college packed with doctors, sending a fireball soaring into the sky.
Distressing video footage shows the jet’s fateful last moments as it rapidly lost altitude and speed, which would have filled the cockpit with a cacophony of terrifying alarms.
Captain Sabharwal and Clive Kundar, his co-pilot with 1,100 hours of experience, issued a desperate mayday call warning the plane was ‘losing power’.
The footage appears to show them hopelessly trying to nudge up the nose of their sinking aircraft moments before the devastating impact.
Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, who had 8,200 hours of flying experience, desperately cried ‘Mayday…no thrust, losing power, unable to lift’ before the aircraft went down and hit a residential property
Officer Clive Kunder, from Mumbai, was also on the doomed Air India flight that crashed moments after take-off
Passangers’ luggage lies at the crash site after the plane, bound for London’s Gatwick Airport, crashed during take-off from Ahmedabad Airport
The plane momentarily disappeared from view behind trees and buildings before a massive fireball erupted on the horizon
Instead of its scheduled 4,200-mile, nine-hour 50-minute non-stop journey to Gatwick, the Air India flight came down just 1.5 miles beyond the end of the runway, in the densely-populated Meghaninagar neighbourhood of the city in Gujarat, northwest India.
The jet smashed into the doctors’ hostel of BJ Medical College, sending debris, smoke and fire hundreds of feet into the air, and turning the whole area into what looked like a war zone.
As well as most on board, at least 50 people on the ground are said to have been killed and scores more injured.
Doctors, students and staff were having lunch in the hostel’s canteen when the Boeing 787’s landing gear embedded itself in the hall with a deafening boom. Hellish video showed shellshocked diners fleeing amid tables laid out with abandoned lunches.
Aviation experts put forward two leading theories: a flock of birds being sucked into the engines, disabling them both when needed most, and a mystery over the aircraft’s ‘flaps’.
Captain Saurabh Bhatnagar, a former senior pilot, said the engines may have failed after a bird-strike, similar to the Jeju Air crash in South Korea last December.
He said: ‘From the footage I have seen, it looks like prima facie the case of multiple bird hits. The takeoff was perfect.’
Salil Colge, a lecturer in aviation management at University College Birmingham, added: ‘Historically there have been reports of several bird strikes in this area in the past, and that could be one of the possibilities.’
But others said there were no puffs of smoke from engines in the video footage, which might be expected from bird-strikes.
Marco Chan, of Buckinghamshire New University, in Wycombe, queried the apparent position of the flaps on the wings. There was speculation the plane was not correctly set up for takeoff, with the flaps not properly deployed. They are segments of the wing that can be extended to assist with lift. If set wrongly, they could stall the plane.
Terry Tozer, a former pilot and author of the book ‘Why planes crash’, told Sky News an issue with the flaps was ‘a reasonably logical explanation for a well-designed aircraft sinking to the earth in this way.’
The tail end of the 186-foot fuselage was pictured sticking out of an upper storey of the college, and other large chunks including a severed wing were scattered around the neighbourhood. Some five or six nearby buildings were instantly turned into infernos by the catastrophic fireball; the Air India plane had been laden with 80 to 90 tons of aviation fuel for the long journey to London.
Officer Clive Kunder, from Mumbai, was also on the doomed Air India flight that crashed moments after take-off
Members of a local community stand outside the Leicester family home of Viswash, the British survivor of the London-bound Air India aircraft crash
People stand outside the survivor’s family home in Leicester on Thursday after news of the crash
Plumes of billowing black smoke could be seen for miles around and emergency services battled for hours to contain multiple blazes.
Somehow, amid this firestorm of death and chaos, out walked the ‘luckiest man in the world’. Mr Ramesh, from the Dreamliner’s Seat 11A, seemingly displayed barely any visible serious injuries as he was filmed hobbling from the disaster zone.
The British father’s miraculous survival is all the more astonishing given that, not only did he get off a crashed plane, he then apparently managed to navigate a raging inferno.
He walked unaided from a neighbourhood that was an apocalyptic scene. Charred bodies were scattered among twisted metal and scorched earth. Suitcases – some incongruously unscathed – were strewn among the debris, and blackened trees lay upended and smouldering.
Mr Ramesh’s brother Nayan, from Leicester, said he was meant to be collecting his siblings from Gatwick.
‘We were going to have a party on the weekend, a family gathering,’ he told Sky News.
The last time he spoke to his brother Ajay – who was tragically also on the plane – was the day before when they were arranging plans for pickup at the airport.
‘He was like, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow’, those were his last words to me,’ Nayan said.
Indian TV showed pictures of victims being rushed away on stretchers to ambulances.
Vidhi Chaudhary, a top state police commissioner, said the dead included medical students, adding: ‘Most of the bodies have been charred beyond recognition.’
Last night as the scale of destruction was becoming clear, acrid smoke hung in the air as hundreds of rescue workers toiled through the night under searchlights seeking survivors.
Authorities faced a grim task of identifying corpses, with relatives urged to supply DNA samples to help.
Locals who had witnessed their ordinary day turn to carnage in a split-second were struggling to come to terms with a disaster that has been compared to the day in 1988 when 207 lives were lost at Lockerbie, Scotland, when Pan Am 103 was blown out of the sky.
A woman called Ramila told the Ani news agency: ‘My son had gone to the hostel during lunch break, and the plane crashed there. He jumped from the second floor, so he suffered some injuries.’
Neighbour Raju Prajapati added: ‘We heard a huge explosion and rushed out of our homes. There were thick plumes of black smoke rising into the sky. People were shouting and running in all directions.
Rescue team members work as smoke rises at the site in Ahmedabad, India, June 12, 2025
People look at the debris of an Air India plane crashed in Ahmedabad of India’s Gujarat state
Members of local community stand outside the family home of Viswash, the British survivor of the London-bound Air India aircraft crash
The number of fatalities is not yet known but rescuers said at least 30 bodies have so far been recovered from a building
Firefighters work at the site of the crash near Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport
‘Ambulance after ambulance has been arriving. The police and army have cordoned off the area and are not allowing anyone near the wreckage. There is panic and confusion.
‘We are about two kilometres away now, and even here the smoke is still visible.’
Another resident said: ‘We saw people from the building jumping from the second and third floor to save themselves. The plane was in flames.’
A doctor named Krishna who rescued around 15 students with his colleagues said that ‘the nose and front wheel landed on the canteen building where students were having lunch’ and that he saw ‘about 15 to 20 burnt bodies’.
At Ahmedabad Airport, families who had just waved off loved-ones faced the gut-wrenching view of smoke rising on the horizon. Distraught Poonam Patel said: ‘My sister-in-law was going to London. The plane has crashed. We don’t know anything.’
Teams of international air accident investigators have begun the process of recovering and examining the ‘black box’ recorders of flight data and cockpit conversations to work out what went wrong. According to local reports, the Boeing aircraft had undergone a service as recently as March.
