A British man has told how a last-minute change of plans saved him from boarding the Air India jet that crashed in Ahmedabad last Thursday, killing 241 of the 242 people on board. Owen Jackson, 31, from Saffron Walden, Essex, had been working in India and was due to fly home on Flight AI171 last week.
Colleagues suggested he stay an extra couple of days, so he switched to the Saturday departure instead. When his new ticket arrived, he noticed he had been allocated seat 11A, the same seat taken by the sole survivor, Leicester engineer Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, on the ill-fated Thursday service.
Speaking to The Sun, Mr Jackson admitted: “It’s a shock. I’m more grateful than anything else, such a weird coincidence.”
He was in meetings, phone on silent, when news of the crash broke. “I was probably one of the last to find out,” he said.
His wife Philippa, 30, a teacher, spent agonising hours waiting for confirmation that her husband was safe.
“I was just trying not to let the children see what I was feeling,” she told the newspaper. She added: “I still feel affected by it now, to be honest with you. For days I was just bursting into tears randomly.
“The way we felt is nothing compared to how the victims and their families are actually feeling, my heart really goes out to them, it’s just awful.”
Flight AI171, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, went down moments after take-off from Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel airport.
Authorities said 242 people were aboard – 169 India nationals, 53 Britons, seven Portuguese citizens, a Canadian and 12 crew.
Captain Sumeet Sabharwal’s final transmission was a desperate “Mayday” as the jet reportedly lost power and plunged into a doctors’ hostel near the runway.
Investigators have now recovered both the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder and are probing reports of a possible dual-engine failure.
Mr Ramesh, 40, escaped with injuries to his chest, eyes and feet and was filmed hobbling away from the wreckage. All other passengers and crew perished.
Air India’s Dreamliner fleet is now undergoing urgent checks ordered by India’s aviation regulator.
Specialist teams from Boeing and the US National Transportation Safety Board are assisting.
For Owen Jackson, the random seat allocation still feels surreal.
“You hear about plane crashes, but when it’s the one you were booked to be on, and even the same seat, it really makes you think,” he said.