Air India crash in Ahmedabad makes 2025 deadliest aviation year in a decade

South China Morning Post

2 days ago

The crash of Air India Flight 171 has turned 2025 into one of the deadliest years in the past decade for civil aviation.
There were 242 people aboard the Boeing 787, according to the airline, when the plane went down in a fireball on Thursday soon after taking off from Ahmedabad, India. The accident is likely to produce more fatalities, given that it crashed into a residential area. There is only one known survivor.
Globally, the number of civil aviation fatalities has reached more than 460 in 2025, according to Jan-Arwed Richter, founder of Jacdec, a German consulting firm that tracks aviation safety. The average over the past decade is 284 based on the firm's methodology.
Commercial aviation safety reached a high-water mark in 2023, when industry groups said there were no fatal crashes. Since then, a number of high-profile incidents have grabbed headlines.
The deadliest years for civil aviation in the past decade were 2018 and 2015, with more than 500 fatalities each, based on Jacdec's figures.
Richter urged the media not to jump to conclusions while investigators search for the cause of the Air India crash.
'And I want to emphasise the bigger picture here,' Richter said. 'Air travel is and remains the safest way of going from one place to another.'
Thursday's Air India crash is on track to become the worst commercial airline disaster since MH17 in 2014. The Malaysian Airlines flight, shot down over Ukraine, left 298 people dead, according to the Aviation Safety Network, which tracks fatal crashes.
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The lone survivor
As Air India Flight AI171 descended towards its doom on Thursday, Ramesh Vishwaskumar sat in the first row of economy class – headed for some of the most harrowing and luckiest moments of his life.
After the Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed into a densely populated district of the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, Vishwaskumar managed to get out of the plane. He was injured, but alive. All 241 others on board had perished.
A video that has since gone viral on social media shows a slightly bloodied man walking near the crash site, surrounded by an incredulous crowd.
'Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise,' Vishwaskumar told local reporters, according to the Hindustan Times newspaper.
'There were dead bodies around me. I got scared. I got up and ran. There were pieces of the plane everywhere.' Media outlets identified him as a UK citizen aged 40, from the city of Leicester.
It is a tale of survival that stands out in an aircraft accident that ranks as the worst disaster in civil aviation in more than a decade. The cause of the crash, which killed scores more on the ground as the fully fuelled aircraft tore into buildings and exploded into flames, remains unknown.
Members of the local community stand outside the family home of Ramesh Viswashkumar in Leicester, Britain. Viswashkumar is the lone survivor of the London-bound Air India aircraft crash in Ahmedabad, India. Photo: Reuters
What went wrong?
The Boeing Co. 787 Dreamliner appeared to not achieve sufficient thrust as it lumbered down nearly the full length of a 3,352-metre (11,000-foot) runway, a distance that should have been more than enough to take off, said Bob Mann, head of aviation consultant RW Mann & Co.
That could stem from a misconfiguration of the plane before take-off or incorrect weight data entered into the plane's computer system that determines how much power is needed to get off the ground, he said. Mann cautioned that his views were unofficial and not corroborated by data or cockpit voice recorders, which have yet to be recovered from the site.
The 787's landing gear was never retracted, which normally occurs just after take-off, said Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigation chief for the US Federal Aviation Administration.
Investigators from the US National Transportation Safety Board and FAA will travel to India to assist with that government's investigation of the crash.
Additional clues should emerge when authorities recover the plane's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, the so-called black boxes containing key information about what was happening to aeroplane systems and pilots in the flight's final moments.