'Got late by 10 minutes...': Meet the woman who narrowly escaped Air India crash after traffic delay

Ten minutes made the difference between life and death for a passenger about to travel by the Air India plane that crashed on Thursday. Bhoomi Chauhan, a woman travelling alone to London, narrowly escaped boarding Air India flight AI-171, only because she was stuck in traffic. The flight, which took off from Ahmedabad on Thursday afternoon, crashed minutes later, killing over 240 people in one of the deadliest accidents involving a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Chauhan had reached Ahmedabad's Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport shortly after the boarding gates closed. She missed the flight by just ten minutes. “My body is literally shivering. I am not being able to talk. My mind is totally blank now after hearing all that has happened,” she said in a TV news interview.

The Air India flight was scheduled to depart for London around 1:30 p.m. It took off at 1:38 p.m. and crashed shortly after in a residential area near the airport. Data from Flightradar24 shows the plane reached an altitude of just 625 feet before plunging to the ground and exploding into a fireball.

“I am thankful to God. My Ganpati Bappa saved me,” Chauhan said, still shaken from what she described as an unthinkable near-miss. She had come to India after two years to visit family and was set to return to London where she lives with her husband.

“Just because of those ten minutes, I could not board the flight. I don’t know how to explain this,” she added.

Thursday’s crash marks one of the worst accidents involving Boeing’s flagship Dreamliner aircraft. The 12-year-old plane had earlier flown in from Delhi. Emergency services, including firefighting teams, responded to the crash site immediately, but the scale of destruction has left survivors, families, and the aviation community in deep shock.