28-year-old student says she missed Air India flight that crashed due to traffic: "This is totally a miracle for me"
A 28-year-old student who was visiting western India says she missed her Air India flight back to London due to bumper-to-bumper traffic. That flight was AI171, which crashed shortly after takeoff.
Bhoomi Chauhan reportedly said airline staff didn't let her complete her check-in at Ahmedabad airport even though she had checked in online. She said she arrived at the airport less than an hour before departure — and 10 minutes after boarding was scheduled to start — after being stuck in Ahmedabad's city center traffic.
The business administration student who lives in Bristol, England, remembered being frustrated and disappointed.
"We got very angry with our driver and left the airport in frustration," she told BBC Gujarati, a news service by BBC in the Gujarati language.
"We left the airport and stood at a place to drink tea and after a while, before leaving... we were talking to the travel agent about how to get a refund for the ticket," Chauhan said.
"There, I got a call that the plane had gone down," she said.
"This is totally a miracle for me," she added.
CBS News partner BBC News reviewed her digital boarding pass, which showed her assigned to seat 36G. She had traveled to the airport from Ankleshwar, which is about 125 miles from Ahmedabad.
"When I missed the flight, I was dejected," she said. "Only thing that I had in mind was, 'If I had started a little early, I would have boarded the plane.'"
The jet carrying 242 people crashed into buildings in Ahmedabad on Thursday morning, a few minutes after taking off, killing everyone on board except a sole survivor.
The cause of the crash is not yet known. One of the "black boxes" has been recovered from the wreckage of the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, an Indian aviation official said, marking an important step in the investigation.
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