PHUKET, THAILAND: An Air India flight from Phuket in Thailand to India’s capital, New Delhi received an onboard bomb threat on Friday and made an emergency landing on the island, airport authorities said.
All 156 passengers on flight AI 379 had been escorted from the plane, in line with emergency plans, an Airports of Thailand official said.
The aircraft took off from Phuket airport bound for the Indian capital at 9:30am (7:30am PKT) on Friday but made a wide loop around the Andaman Sea and landed back on the southern Thai island, according to flight tracker Flightradar24.
The incident follows the crash of an Air India flight in Ahmedabad on Thursday shortly after takeoff, in which more than 265 people were killed.
AOT did not provide details on the bomb threat. Air India did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Indian airlines and airports were inundated with hoax bomb threats last year, with nearly 1,000 hoax calls and messages received in the first 10 months, nearly 10 times that of 2023.
Blackbox found of crashed Air India 787
Investigators recovered a black box recorder from the crash site on Friday of a London-bound passenger jet that ploughed into a residential area of India’s Ahmedabad city, killing at least 265 people on board and on the ground.
The Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner had issued a mayday call shortly before it crashed around lunchtime on Thursday after lifting barely 100 metres (330 feet) from the ground.
One man on board the plane, which was carrying 242 passengers and crew, miraculously survived Thursday’s fiery crash, which left the tailpiece of the aircraft jutting out of the second floor of a hostel for medical staff from a nearby hospital.
“Initially, I too thought that I was about to die, but then I opened my eyes and realised that I was still alive,” survivor Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a British citizen, told national broadcaster DD News from his hospital bed.
The nose and front wheel of Air India flight 171 landed on a canteen building where students were having lunch, witnesses said.
Deputy Commissioner of Police Kanan Desai said that 265 bodies had been counted so far, which suggested that at least 24 people were killed on the ground. The toll could rise further as more body parts are recovered.
“The official number of deceased will be declared only after DNA testing is completed”, Home Minister Amit Shah said in a statement late on Thursday. DNA samples will be taken from family members of the dead who live abroad, he said.
Air India said there were 169 Indian passengers, 53 British, seven Portuguese, and a Canadian on board the flight bound for London’s Gatwick airport, as well as 12 crew members.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the devastated neighbourhood on Friday and was also pictured by survivor Ramesh’s bedside.
Ramesh, who suffered burns and other injuries, said: “Everything happened in front of me, and even I couldn’t believe how I managed to come out alive from that.”
“Within a minute after takeoff, suddenly… it felt like something got stuck… I realised something had happened, and then suddenly the plane’s green and white lights turned on.”
The Indian government is also considering grounding Air India’s Boeing 787 fleet, Indian broadcaster NDTV reported earlier on Friday, a day after one of the airline’s aircraft of the same make crashed in Ahmedabad city, killing more than 240 people.
The fleet will likely be grounded for a safety review, NDTV reported, citing sources.
