The deadly crash of an Air India flight carrying more than 240 people on Thursday arrives after years of efforts to turn around the country's flag carrier — which had been plagued by tragedy and financial losses under prior state ownership.
In 2010, an Air India flight arriving from Dubai overshot the runway in the city of Mangalore and plunged over a cliff, killing 158 people out of the 166 on board. And in 2020, a flight for Air India Express, a subsidiary of Air India, skidded off a runway in Southern India during heavy rain and cracked in two — killing 18 people and injuring more than 120 others.
Both of those incidents involved older Boeing 737-800 aircrafts — and occurred while Air India was still under governmental control. Indian conglomerate Tata Sons took over Air India in 2022, returning the carrier to private ownership after it was run by the state for decades.
The 180 billion rupee (then worth $2.4 billion) deal was in some ways a homecoming for Air India, with roots that date back to the Tata family's founding of what was then-called Tata Airlines in 1932. It was also part of an wider effort to save the airline — which had become a money-losing, debt-saddled operation.
Jitendra Bhargava, former executive director of the airline and author of “The Descent of Air India,” said government ownership fostered an archaic work culture, outdated processes, and management by bureaucrats unfamiliar with the aviation industry.
“You are getting a recipe for disaster. And we went through it," Bhargava told The Associated Press. As a result, he said, the company hemorrhaged money — which had a “cascading effect” because it couldn’t invest in upgrades.
By the time of the Tata Sons takeover, Air India’s market share was around 12% and at risk of shrinking as competitors expanded. Bhargava and other aviation experts stress that shedding government control was necessary for Air India to compete with other private rivals — and the carrier has since worked to reinvent itself by modernizing both its operations and fleet.
Over recent years, Air India redesigned its branding and ordered hundreds of new planes from both Boeing and Airbus. Analysts don't expect Thursday's crash, which involved a 12-year-old Boeing 787 Dreamliner, to change such partnerships.
"Admittedly, Air India and the Tata organization have been very proud about the fact that they’ve made a major commitment to Boeing," said Anita Mendiratta, an aviation and leadership consultant.
While acknowledging that Boeing has been bruised in recent years, largely due to problems with its 737 Max, Mendiratta noted that there's still been a “hunger” from airlines around the world to add the company's new planes to their fleets after recent delivery delays. That includes demand for the 787 Dreamliner — which, she said, is “one of the most important aircraft when it comes to sustainable aviation, emissions reduction, managing the costs of aviation.”
Boeing has been plagued by its own safety issues, including past deadly crashes. This, however, was the first crash of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, according to the Aviation Safety Network database. And the cause of Thursday’s crash is still unclear.
An international investigation is underway, and Boeing has said it's “working to gather more information.” Air India said it's also working to get answers around what caused the crash — while promising to support those impacted by the tragedy.
“This is a difficult day for all of us at Air India,” CEO Campbell Wilson said in recorded remarks. “Our efforts now are focused entirely on the needs of our passengers, crew members, their families and loved ones.”
Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, added in a statement that “no words can adequately express the grief we feel at this moment.” He said that the company would provide 10 million rupees (nearly $116,795) to the families of each person "who has lost their life in this tragedy” — and also cover medical expenses of anyone who was injured.
The Boeing 787 crashed into a medical college after takeoff in India’s northwestern city of Ahmedabad. A single passenger survived the crash, according to a senior Indian official and Air India. But the airline said there were no other survivors — putting the latest death toll at 241.
Beyond the fatal accidents in 2010 and 2020, an Air India Boeing 747 flight also crashed into the Arabian Sea in 1978, killing all 213 aboard.
The carrier was under government control from 1953 through 2022.
Other fatal accidents involving India’s state-owned airlines include the more than 50 people who died in a crash in the eastern city of Patna in 2000. In 1993, a flight crashed in the western city Aurangabad, killing 55. In 1988, over 130 died when a plane crashed while landing in Ahmedabad and in 1991, a crash near northeastern city Imphal killed 69 people aboard.
Grantham-Philips reported from New York and Ghosal reported from Hanoi, Vietnam. AP writer Danica Kirka in London contributed to this report.
The tail of the airplane is seen stuck in a building at the site of an airplane that crashed in India's northwestern city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat state, Thursday, June 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Ajit Solanki)
NEW YORK (AP) — No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.
In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government's top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.
To President Donald Trump, "We seem to have things under very good control," as he told reporters Friday evening.
To experts, the situation aboard a cruise ship has not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.
“The CDC is not even a player," said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I've never seen that before.”
Not until late Friday did CDC actions accelerate.
Health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to Spain's Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet the Americans onboard. They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to a quarantine center. Also, the CDC issued its first health alert to U.S. doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases.
The CDC's diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.
The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man's wife and a German woman, who both died.
Hantavirus was first identified as a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.
For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what they should know and how they should worry.
Such actions were a large reason why the CDC developed a reputation as the world's premier public health agency.
But this time, the WHO has been center stage. It made the risk assessment that has told people the outbreak is not a pandemic threat.
“I don’t think this is a giant threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,” she said.
The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, has restricted CDC scientists from talking to international counterparts at times and embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through one-on-one agreements with individual countries.
The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency's ship sanitation program.
As this was playing out, Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he was working to “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”
The CDC has not been completely silent on hantavirus.
The agency on Wednesday issued a short statement that said the risk to the American public is “extremely low,” and described the U.S. government as “the world’s leader in global health security.”
Said Nuzzo: “Not only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility.”
The CDC's acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, posted a message on social media that the agency was lending its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials this week said they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who left the ship — a person with no symptoms and not considered contagious — had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC has been sharing technical information.
The CDC also is “monitoring the health status and preparing medical support for all of the American passengers on the cruise,” Bhattacharya wrote.
But federal health officials have mostly been tight-lipped, declining interview requests.
In interviews this week, some experts made a comparison with a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the setting of one of the first large COVID-19 outbreaks outside of China.
The CDC sent personnel to the port, helped evacuate American passengers, ran quarantines, shared genetic data on the virus, coordinated with the WHO and Japan, held public briefings and rapidly published reports “that became the world’s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director.
Some aspects of the international response to the Diamond Princess were criticized, and it did not halt the outbreak or stop COVID-19’s spread across the world. But some experts say it was not for the CDC's lack of trying.
“The CDC was right on top of it, very visible, very active in trying to manage and contain it,” Gostin said, while the agency's work now is delayed and subdued.
Instead of working with nearly all of the world's nations through the WHO, the Trump administration has pursued bilateral health agreements with individual nations for information sharing, public health support, and what it describes as “the introduction of innovative American technologies.” Roughly 30 agreements are currently in place.
That's not sufficient, Gostin said. “You can't possibly cover a global health crisis by doing one-on-one deals with countries here and there,” he said.
Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York, Darlene Superville in Washington and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Passengers on the the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, watch epidemiologists board the boat in Praia, during their voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)
Workers set up temporary shelters in the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
Crew members of the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, wait their turns for a first interview with epidemiologists, during the voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)
Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship into an ambulance at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
A Spanish Civil Guard officer inspects the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
