‘I missed the Air India flight that crashed by 10 minutes – this is what saved my life’ | World | News
A British student who was booked onto the doomed Air India flight that killed over 200 people missed the plane by just 10 minutes after being stuck in traffic. Boomi Chauhan, 28, was due to travel back from a holiday in west India on Thursday when bumper-to-bumper traffic in Ahmedabad put her behind schedule.
The business administration student from Bristol recounted being “very angry” with her driver after arriving too late to check-in for flight AI171, which crashed just seconds after take-off. Despite begging airport staff to let her board the plane after entering the airport less than an hour before departure, she was turned away and was attempting to get a refund for the journey when news of the disaster came in. “We got very angry with our driver and left the airport in frustration,” Ms Chauhan told the BBC. “I was very disappointed.”
“We left the airport and stood at a place to drink tea and after a while, before leaving … we were talking to a travel agent about how to get a refund for the ticket.
“There, I got a call that the plane had gone down.”
The 28-year-old, who had a ticket for seat 36G of the Boeing 787-8, described her brush with death as “a total miracle”.
“When I missed the flight, I was dejected,” she said. “[The] only thing that I had in mind was, ‘If I had started a little early, I would have boarded the plane’.”
Check-in for the flight closed at 12:10pm local time, 10 minutes before Ms Chauhan arrived at Ahmedabad airport.
The London-bound plane departed at 1:39pm, but video footage showed it struggling to gain altitude and crashing into a nearby medical college seconds after take-off.
Of the 241 people who are feared to have died in the tragic crash, 169 were Indian nationals, 52 British nationals, seven Portuguese nationals and one Canadian.
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, 40, the only survivor of the horror collision, said he “crawled out of the wreckage” of the jet after it “slammed into a building and exploded”.
The Brit told DD News: “For a moment, I felt like I was going to die. But when I opened my eyes and looked around me, I realised I was alive. I still can’t believe how I survived.”
