Air India 787-8 (VT-ANB) involved in the crash – credit, RyanZ225 PC (aka ZhangerAviation) CC 4.0. BY-SA

Rarely is there good news to be found amid the wreckage of a crashed plane, but from the Air India flight which recently went down in Ahmedabad, a ray of positivity emerges.

The crash claimed 241 souls on board, but it could have been dozens, perhaps hundreds more on the ground, based on the last minute heroics of pilot Sumeet Sabharwal.

Eyewitness reports speaking to the Sun in the UK saw that Sabharwal diverted the doomed Boeing 787 from crashing into an apartment building among the last seconds before impact.

“Thanks to the pilot Captain Sabharwal, we survived. He’s a hero. It is because of him we are alive,” said Jahanvi Rajput, 28, whose home narrowly escaped destruction. “The green space next to us was visible to him and that’s where he went.”

“If the plane had crashed into this residential area, there would have been hundreds more victims,” according to locals living around the crash site.

Suffering from a “catastrophic engine failure” shortly after takeoff, 55-year-old Captain Sabharwal, who colleagues described as a “good, quiet person,” took the jet into the top two floors of a disused four-story military building adjacent to a medical college hostel building.

That impact, and the subsequent immolation of 90 tons of jet fuel added to the casualty list from the passengers on the aircraft, among whom only a single man survived.

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Control tower footage shows that the experienced Sabharwal had less than 10 seconds to see the apartment and the empty building next to it, as the plane lost engine power shortly after taking off from the runway.

The nose was still pointing up when the plane impacted on a glide path. 18 families lived in the apartment building—all of whom survived because of the decision Sabharwal made.

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In the aftermath, the Tata Group, which owns Air India, followed Montreal Convention protocol and extended a death benefit of $120,000 to each of the families who lost a loved one on the plane and on the ground, before announcing they would fund the reconstruction of the medical hostel. Air India retired the flight number 171.

An investigation into the malfunction is expected to report its findings in three months’ time.

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