A British dad has shared his shock and expressed his gratitude for the last minute flight change that saved his life – he was due on the Air India flight 171 this week
A British dad was originally due to fly home on the doomed Air India flight – but changed his plans at the very last minute and tells of the very bizarre coincidence with his new booking.
Owen Jackson, 31, from Saffron Walden in Essex, had been in India on a work trip and was scheduled to fly back this week but had to decide between flying back on Thursday or Saturday. In the end his colleagues said to take the Saturday flight as the job would take a bit longer than originally planned.
He was then booked onto the same route on Saturday which would have been the same aircraft as the one which crashed, killing all but one of the 242 people onboard. In a bizarre coincidence, Owen was booked onto seat 11A for the Saturday flight – the seat number belonging to the only survivor of flight 171.
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft, which had been bound for London’s Gatwick Airport, was carrying 242 passengers and crew members when it crashed minutes after taking off from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport. Right before losing signal, the aircraft sent a “mayday” message to colleagues on the ground, alerting them to an emergency situation.
The Dreamliner crashed directly into a dining room at B J Medical College, in a residential area of Ahmedabad, western India, while medical students were sitting down for their lunch. However, in a turn of events deemed miraculous by some, passenger Vishwash Kumar Ramesh managed to escape the horror ordeal, surviving with “impact injuries” on his chest, eyes and feet.
Owen told The Sun: “It’s a shock. I’m more grateful than anything else – it is such a weird coincidence. You hear it every now and again about planes going down and you don’t really think much of it, but when it’s the actual aircraft you’re potentially getting on two days later, it does make you think. My main emotion on the whole thing is I’m quite grateful for the fact that I made that decision when I did.”
When news first broke of the crash, Owen had not told his family back home which day he was due to fly back on. Wife Phillipa, 30, spent two hours unsure whether her husband had perished in the crash. Phillipa said: “It was surreal. It was like being in a dream, but not actually just hoping to wake up, but pinching yourself over and over again and not waking up.”
Owen said: “I hadn’t checked my phone two hours after it happened, after the news broke. I probably was one of the last people to find out about it, funnily enough, because I was in meetings exactly when the news was breaking.
Families who have lost loved ones in the Air India Flight 171 catastrophe will be offered £86,000, as pledged by Air India owners the Tata Group.
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