Aryan Asari, a school boy from a nearby village of Ahmedabad had a hobby of watching aero planes in the sky. Sometime towards noon on the ill-fated day of the plane crash, he climbed a nearby terrace and wanted to film the flight of an aeroplane on his phone. He saw one taking off and recorded it for thirty seconds by the end of which he saw the aeroplane going down, and becoming a huge ball of fire followed by wide coils of smoke rising into the sky.
What he recorded became the best record available of the crash of Air India Dreamliner Boeing 787 on 12 June 2025.
The plane crash took me to several years back when a Jet Airways plane in which I was travelling, crash landed in the Indore airport. It comes to mind because of the terrible impact it had on me as I was one of the passengers of that ill-fated plane which was later taken away from the airport in several pieces. It was strangely beneficial that the aircraft crashed at a time when it was heavily raining due to which the plane did not catch fire and the passengers and the crew were not killed, except that seven of us, including one of the airhostesses, were injured.
It was a hopping flight from Delhi via Jodhpur and Bhopal and with its final destination at Indore. I got in from Delhi after a function in Delhi where I reached that morning to deliver a keynote address of a conference of professors. In the afternoon, I had to leave for Shirpur in Maharashtra. The nearest airport was at Indore and hence, I decided to take a flight to Indore and travel to Shirpur by car to an engineering college where I had to start a learning and development intervention for the members of the faculty. At the Delhi airport, I picked two books from a shop.
I was reading one of the books throughout the journey. The stoppages at Jodhpur and Bhopal were not a waste of time as I was glued to the book. I had no awareness of the heavy rain outside until the pilot announced so and asked the passengers to fasten seat belts. It is then that a sudden jerk woke me up from my reading. The plane shook rather violently and there were shouts from the aisles. Within seconds I heard a loud sound and the aircraft shook violently and a grinding sound accompanied the aircraft’s landing. There the aircraft stopped suddenly, with the string of forward thrusts. Then there was a deadening sound followed by a deadly silence.
An airhostess was near me soon. I was in the second row and by then realised that something had hit me on my forehead. She had opened an emergency exit which was within ten feet of me. I heard the air hostess shouting at me and almost pulling me to the exit door. I moved and jumped out through that exit door.
It was all dark outside until an ambulance arrived in great speed. In its lights, people could be seen. It was then that I had a taste of some different liquid in my mouth and I touched my lips and in the light of the ambulance, I could see that it was blood. It was then that I understood that I was hurt on my forehead and had been bleeding profusely. I noticed that my shirt front was full of blood and as I wore white it was easily noticed.
At the hospital, a Sikh doctor, who attended to me, cleaned my wound with the help of a couple of nurses and told me about the choice that I could make. He said if he could remove a piece of skin that had come out, it would create a permanent mark or if he could keep the skin back and stitch it there, it would take more time to cure though the marks left behind later may be small. I had to take a quick decision for which I was not qualified or even ready. I asked him what would be his option and he said he would opt for the latter. In fifteen minutes he stitched my skin back on to the forehead.
By this time, the officials of the Jet Airways had arrived and I asked them to take me to a better hospital where MRI would be available because I wanted to make sure that there was no internal head injury. I was shifted to the Bombay Hospital of Indore where necessary checks and an MRI of my head was also taken. They gave me a couple of injections to make sure that the wound would heal soon. I remembered that I had to collect my luggage and there was a need that I myself had to go and identify the luggage because the tag numbers were all spoiled in the rain. So, with the permission of the doctors, Jet Airways officials took me to the airport, I identified my luggage and brought them with me to the observation room in the Bombay Hospital.
A day in the hospital I was discharged and left for Shirpur where I conducted the faculty development programme for three days with the stitches and the plaster partially covered by my hair which was long enough to cover the top of the forehead.
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Prof. Sunney Tharappan, is Director of College for Leadership and HRD, Mangaluru. He trains and writes and lives in Mangaluru.