The sound of jet engines was deafening

It was a balmy Thursday afternoon on the residential hostel of the BJ Medical Faculty and the canteen was teeming with college students getting lunch.

The room buzzed with the sound of jokes, banter between pals, and the odd bit of educational dialogue.

By 13:39 native time, there have been not less than 35 folks within the cafeteria. Some had already collected their meals and had been lounging round, whereas others had been within the queue ready for his or her flip.

The scholars blended with medical doctors and members of the family. Then, the whole lot modified.

The overall hum of the canteen was pierced by the sound of approaching jet engines – after which the room exploded.

Lower than a minute earlier, Flight AI171 had taken off from the runway at Ahmedabad’s airport, simply 1.5km (4,800ft) away.

The Air India 787 Dreamliner was certain for London, carrying 242 folks.

However one thing had gone catastrophically mistaken, and mere seconds after its wheels left the bottom, the aircraft was in hassle. A mayday name was despatched earlier than it got here crashing down right into a busy residential space – on prime of the medical doctors’ hostel – sending an enormous fireball into the sky and killing all however one particular person on board.

The BBC has spoken to eyewitnesses, together with college students who had been within the hostel, together with pals of the trainee medical doctors who died and their academics, to piece collectively what occurred in these terrifying few seconds – and the aftermath that adopted.

Folks on the bottom close by could not instantly work out what had occurred.

A health care provider, who works with the school’s kidney sciences division, says he and his colleagues had been of their constructing, about 500 metres away, once they heard a “deafening sound” exterior.

“At first, we thought it was lightening. However then we puzzled, may that be attainable in 40C dry warmth?”

The medical doctors ran exterior.

That is once they heard just a few folks screaming: “Look, come right here, a aircraft has crashed into our constructing.”

The subsequent jiffy had been a blur. Scenes of chaos descended on the campus as folks ran round attempting to flee – or discover out what had occurred.

Brothers Prince and Krish Patni had been on their bikes only a few metres from the hostel once they heard the noise.

“Inside seconds we may see one thing that resembled a wing of a aircraft,” Prince, 18, instructed the BBC.

“We rushed to the scene, however the warmth from the explosion was intense and we could not enter the hostel. There was lots of particles.”

The brothers, together with just a few different volunteers from the native space, waited for the warmth to subside earlier than trying to bodily enter the constructing. They labored along with the police to maneuver a few of the particles from the doorway.

Once they lastly reached the canteen, they could not see anybody.

Darkish, dense clouds of smoke had engulfed the room. The air smelled of burned metallic. The brothers, who simply minutes earlier than had been heading to play cricket, started eradicating cooking gasoline cylinders to keep away from any additional explosions, Krish, 20, defined.

The brothers and different volunteers then noticed a pile of suitcases and went to maneuver them. What unfolded subsequent, they mentioned, was intestine wrenching.

Behind them, they started to make out the shapes of individuals.

Most had been alive. Some had spoons filled with meals of their hand, some had plates of meals in entrance of them, and a few had glasses of their hand.

They had been all badly injured.

They had been additionally silent, in shock. Simply minutes earlier than they had been having their regular afternoon. Now, they had been surrounded by charred metallic items of plane.

“They did not even get an opportunity to react,” one other physician, who was in a close-by constructing, mentioned.

A second yr pupil, who lives within the hostel, was amongst those that managed to flee.

He was sitting at his regular spot – a big desk on the nook of the mess, subsequent to one of many partitions – with 9 others when the aircraft crashed.

“There was an enormous bang and a horrible screeching sound. Subsequent factor we knew, we had been below big boulders, caught with out wherever to go,” he says. “The fireplace and smoke of the crashed aircraft was near our face and it was exhausting to breathe.”

He acquired extreme chest wounds within the accident and remains to be present process therapy at a neighborhood hospital. And he does not know what occurred to his pals.

A number of eyewitnesses instructed the BBC the huge wing of the aircraft first pierced by means of the roof adopted by components of the fuselage. The injury was most extreme the place the wing fell.

Within the chaos, college students started to leap from as excessive because the second and third flooring to flee. College students later instructed how one of many solely staircases out was blocked by particles.

It isn’t identified how many individuals had been killed on the bottom.

Dr Minakshi Parikh, dean of the BJ Medical Faculty and Civil Hospital, instructed the BBC that 4 of their college students had died, in addition to 4 college students’ kin.

However precisely what number of and who was killed might take days to determine: investigators have to depend on DNA to formally determine the our bodies discovered within the wreckage.

And it was not simply folks within the canteen at that second who had been killed.

Only a few kilometres away was Ravi Thakur, who labored within the hostel kitchen. He had gone out to ship lunch containers in different hostels across the metropolis. His spouse and their two-year-old daughter stayed behind as regular.

When he heard the information, he rushed again however discovered utter chaos. Round 45 minutes had handed and the place was filled with locals, firefighters, ambulance employees and Air India employees.

He tried to search for his spouse and youngster however could not discover them.

Again on the essential hospital block, academics are nonetheless attempting make sense of the chaos.

“I used to show these college students and knew them personally. The injured college students are nonetheless being handled within the hospital, and they’re our precedence in the meanwhile,” one professor on the school instructed the BBC.

In the meantime, Ravi Thakur remains to be trying to find his family members, at the same time as his hopes fade quick.