Air India pilot may have saved thousands of lives with final act

The pilot of the doomed Air India flight that crashed last week may have made a last-ditch heroic act that saved thousands of lives, according to reports.

The tragic incident saw an aircraft said to be a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner crash less than a minute after taking off from Ahmedabad, India, colliding with a medical college hostel and claiming the lives of 270 people.

An investigation into what exactly happened is ongoing, with the plane having experienced difficulties from the second it left the runway.

Captain Sumeet Sabharwal was the first pilot onboard, and at his side he had his second pilot, Officer Clive Kundar. Sabharwal, it’s said, was closing on retirement, while Kundar’s aviation career was just getting started.

The two raised the alarm in connection with the terrible crash, and their tragic message has now been made public.

“Mayday… no thrust, losing power, unable to lift,” Sabharwal said in his final message to air traffic control.

AHMEDABAD, INDIA – JUNE 13: Investigative officials stand at the site of Air India Boeing 787 which crashed yesterday, on June 13, 2025 in Ahmedabad, India. An Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner, flight AI-171, carrying 242 passengers and crew members en route from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick, crashed shortly after takeoff on June 12, 2025, after the pilot issued a mayday call to air traffic control. The aircraft crashed into the densely populated Meghani Nagar area near Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport, resulting in a massive explosion and fire due to the heavy fuel load for the international journey, with rescue operations ongoing. (Photo by Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images)

As stated, the plane crashed into a medical college hostel, killing a number of people on the ground, as well as all those but one onboard the aircraft.

Yet virtually impossible as it is to find any kind of silver lining in such a heartbreaking tragedy, the death toll might have been significantly higher if not for the actions of the pilot.

At least that’s what’s being speculated online, with a theory detailing how a last second decision was made to avoid the Civil Hospital Ahmedabad, which lies just over 5km away from Ahmedabad airport. The medical facility reportedly has over 3,000 beds in it, meaning the potential for loss of life had the plane crashed there would have been significantly higher than that which came to pass.

In a Reddit discussion on the matter, one person wrote: “Air India AI-171 crashed just 1.7 km from the Ahmedabad airport. It crashed in a somewhat loosely populated area which has doctor’s hostels and mess for medical students of BJMC and Civil Hospital Ahmedabad.”

“Just 400 metres north of the crash site is a civil hospital and south just adjacent to the airport wall is a high-density residential area,” they continued.

At the time of writing, it’s yet unknown exactly what caused last week’s disaster – India’s deadliest in over three decades – but the discover of the airplane’s blackbox promises more information.

Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu, Minister of Civil Aviation of India, said finding the box marked ‘an important step forward in the investigation’ and that it would ‘significantly aid the inquiry’.

Rest in peace to all those who lost their lives in the Air India crash.