Saved for the most banal of reasons: she had missed the flight, that Air India Boeing 787 that was supposed to take her from Ahmedabad to London, due to heavy traffic.
This is the story of Bhoomi Chauhan, a 27-year-old student who survived the massacre . Because of the "columns of cars lined up in the streets, I arrived at 12:20, 10 minutes after boarding closed," she told the BBC. "I got very angry and left the airport frustrated. I was disappointed. So I stopped at a bar to drink tea and in the meantime I tried to speak to the travel agent to get a refund for the ticket. But then I received a call: they informed me that the plane had crashed. A divine hand saved me ."
From that phone call he discovered that the plane he was supposed to be on crashed into a house a few seconds after takeoff from London Gatwick, killing 241 of the 242 people on board and dozens more on the ground.
Meanwhile, the long-awaited work of Indian and British investigators and experts is taking off, called upon to shed light on the causes of the disaster. To provide plausible answers on what could have happened in those 30 seconds between the take-off of the modern Dreamliner and the crash, on why the landing gear did not retract, the wing flaps ended up out of position or the engines apparently lost power.
Answers that take time, while the impact area - where pieces of the plane are scattered over a few hundred meters - is combed to recover any useful element. The Indian Civil Aviation Minister, Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu, confirmed the discovery of the black box, at least one of the two that are usually on board: key instruments since they record respectively the flight data and the voices of the pilots in the cockpit.
The investigations involve the American major Boeing and the national airline Air India (controlled by the mega holding Tata and also involved yesterday in the emergency landing of an Airbus A320 just taken off from the Thai island of Phuket to New Delhi, due to a false bomb scare): both inevitably under pressure. The CEO of the US giant, Kelly Ortberg, has assured maximum collaboration, revoking participation in a week's Paris Le Bourget air show to "focus attention" on the Ahmedabad incident.
Following the incident, the Indian aviation regulator (DGCA) has in the meantime ordered extra blanket inspections of all Boeing 787-8 and 787-9 aircraft before allowing them to take off from the country: as a precautionary measure and "until further notice".
(Online Union)