[Source: Reuters]

More than 240 people were killed when an Air India plane bound for London crashed moments after taking off from the city of Ahmedabad on Thursday, authorities said, in the world’s worst aviation disaster in a decade.

The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, with 242 people on board, which was headed for Gatwick Airport, south of the British capital, had only one survivor after it crashed onto a medical college hostel during lunch hour.

The sole survivor is a British national of Indian origin and is being treated in a hospital, the airline confirmed. The man told Indian media how he had heard a loud noise shortly after Flight AI171 took off.

“We are still verifying the number of dead, including those killed in the building where the plane crashed,” Vidhi Chaudhary, a top state police officer, told Reuters.

She said the death toll was more than 240, revising down a previous toll of 294 as it included body parts that had been double counted. It was not immediately clear how many of the dead had been on the aircraft or on the ground.

The only known surviving passenger was in seat 11A, next to an emergency exit, Chaudhary said, adding that there could be more survivors in hospital.

“Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed,” 40-year-old Ramesh Viswashkumar told the Hindustan Times, which showed a boarding pass for seat 11A in that name online.

“It all happened so quickly,” he told the paper from his hospital bed.

“When I got up, there were bodies all around me. I was scared. I stood up and ran. There were pieces of the plane all around me,” he said. “Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital.”

He said that his brother, Ajay, was seated in a different row on the plane. “He was travelling with me and I can’t find him anymore. Please help me find him,” he said.

Ahmedabad police chief G.S. Malik said the bodies recovered could include both passengers and people killed on the ground. The dead included Vijay Rupani, the former chief minister of Gujarat state, of which Ahmedabad is the main city.

Relatives have been asked to give DNA samples to identify the dead, state health secretary Dhananjay Dwivedi said.

Parts of the plane’s fuselage were scattered around the smouldering building into which it crashed. The tail of the plane was stuck on top of the building.

The passengers included 217 adults, 11 children and two infants, a source told Reuters. Air India said 169 were Indian nationals, 53 were Britons, seven Portuguese, and one Canadian.

It was the first crash for the Dreamliner, a wide-body airliner that began flying commercially in 2011, according to the Aviation Safety Network database. The plane that crashed on Thursday flew for the first time in 2013 and was delivered to Air India in January 2014, Flightradar24 said.

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