Twin Crashes That Shook A Nation
By Prachi Desai
Ahmedabad, a city cradled in the industrial and cultural heart of Gujarat, has seen the transformative arc of India’s aviation narrative unfold in blood and smoke. From the obscured fields of Chiloda in 1988 to the smouldering ruins of Meghani Nagar in 2025, two devastating crashes have not only stained the city's skies but also laid bare the gaps that still linger in India's aviation safety ecosystem. These twin tragedies—separated by nearly four decades—stand like grim bookends to a story of progress pockmarked with oversight.
On the fog-draped morning of October 19, 1988, Indian Airlines Flight 113 approached Ahmedabad airport with 135 souls on board. What should have been a routine descent turned into a calamity when the Boeing 737-2A8 clipped high-tension wires and tree tops, plunging into a field near Chiloda village. The crash claimed 133 lives in an instant. Only two passengers survived—scarred, battered, but alive to tell the tale.
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| Rescue operation at the crash site began on a war footing |
In the aftermath, the nation woke to the harsh truth that progress in civil aviation meant little without accompanying discipline and accountability. Investigators unearthed a sobering tale of procedural lapses: the flight crew had descended below the prescribed minimum decision altitude (MDA) without any visual confirmation of the runway—a cardinal sin in aviation. Communication with Air Traffic Control (ATC) was patchy, updates were delayed, and the crew, seemingly overconfident, underestimated the danger posed by the low visibility.
What followed was a sweeping overhaul of cockpit resource management (CRM), stricter adherence to approach protocols in inclement weather, and upgraded training modules for ATC personnel. Chiloda, for all its anonymity, had catalysed a long-overdue rethink in India's civil aviation landscape.
But history, as it often does when its lessons are only half-learnt, returned with deadlier vengeance.
On June 12, 2025, Air India Flight AI171—a gleaming Boeing 787 Dreamliner packed with 230 passengers and 12 crew en route to London Gatwick—lifted off from Ahmedabad's Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport. Barely had it gained altitude when disaster struck. Within seconds, the aircraft lost contact, nosedived, and slammed into the crowded neighbourhood of Meghani Nagar.
The scale of devastation was staggering. Of the 242 aboard, only one—British-Indian Vishwash Kumar Ramesh—survived. On the ground, more than 50 unsuspecting civilians, including schoolchildren and young medical interns, were killed as flames devoured homes, clinics, and dreams in equal measure. The pilot had barely enough time to issue a Mayday—a ghostly whisper from the cockpit that hinted at mechanical failure too swift to counter.
If the 1988 crash was a cautionary tale of human error, the 2025 disaster screamed of modernity’s betrayal. A Dreamliner—an emblem of 21st-century aerospace sophistication—had failed catastrophically. No storms, no fog, no pilot miscalculation. Just a fatal technological misfire amid an urban landscape that should never have sat so perilously close to a major flight path.
The contrasts couldn’t be starker. Chiloda’s agrarian expanse absorbed the 1988 wreckage silently. Meghani Nagar’s urban density magnified the 2025 tragedy exponentially. One was the price of negligence; the other, a toll exacted by urban chaos and possible systemic failure. Both, however, stemmed from a shared malaise—a reluctance to anticipate the worst.
The horrifying civilian toll in Meghani Nagar prompts urgent, uncomfortable questions: Have India’s urban sprawls outpaced their aviation infrastructure? Are airport safety buffers being respected as cities burst at their seams? And most crucially, has the culture of aviation safety matured in sync with technology?
In the wake of 1988, regulatory reform brought improvements in visibility protocols, cockpit communication, and ATC procedures. The 2025 crash will likely trigger audits across the Boeing 787 fleet, a reinvestigation of emergency preparedness across Indian airports, and perhaps finally push policymakers to legislate zoning restrictions around critical flight corridors.
Yet, unless these tragedies lead to actionable, lasting change—beyond the realm of committee reports and token compensation—India risks repeating its past with greater consequences.
From the thick fog of Chiloda to the raging inferno of Meghani Nagar, the stories are united by a singular truth: Progress without vigilance is perilous. In aviation, where the margin for error is measured in feet and seconds, complacency—be it of man or machine—is the most dangerous altitude of all.
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