AHMEDABAD, India (AP) — The Air India plane crash this week was one of India’s worst aviation disasters, killing 241 people on board and several people on the ground.
Indian authorities said Friday the investigation into the crash was underway and is expected to include experts from the plane's maker Boeing and U.S. aviation regulators.
The Air India plane crashed minutes after takeoff Thursday afternoon in the northwestern city of Ahmedabad. Surreal images captured both the plane's last moments and the horror of the crash site, with rescuers picking through smoking debris as they searched for survivors.
Here's what is known about the crash:
The lone survivor was a passenger, Vishwashkumar Ramesh, a British national of Indian origin.
Ramesh was thrown from the aircraft and walked to an ambulance, according to Dr. Dhaval Gameti, who treated Ramesh. The doctor told The Associated Press that Ramesh was disoriented, with multiple injuries, but that he seemed to be out of danger.
Another medic said Ramesh told him that immediately after the plane took off, it began descending and suddenly split in two, throwing him out before a loud explosion.
The airline said there were no other survivors among the 242 passengers and crew on board.
Security camera footage verified by The Associated Press showed the plane taking off and then veering slightly to the side. It then drops into a downward glide, disappears briefly from sight and hits the ground.
Moments later, a huge orange and black fireball appears, rising high into the air.
At the crash site, the tail cone of the aircraft with damaged stabilizer fins still attached was lodged near the top of a building. The plane's jagged cavity has torn into the facade. A web of cracks spirals outward from the plane's impact.
The battered building in Ahmedabad was the dining area for medical students and they were having lunch when the plane crashed.
Indrajeet Singh Solanki, a witness and rescuer, said that at first it was chaotic, with smoke everywhere.
"We could see some small parts (of the plane) burning. Just like this wing lying over here,” he said. “Through the smoke, we kept rescuing injured people and rushed them to the trauma center in the civil hospital in auto rickshaws. We rushed nine people to the hospital.”
The airline had been plagued by tragedy and financial losses under prior state ownership.
In 2010, an Air India flight arriving from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, overshot the runway in Mangalore, India, and plunged over a cliff, killing 158 of the 166 people on board. In 2020, a flight for the Air India Express subsidiary skidded off a runway in southern India during heavy rain and cracked in two — killing 18 people and injuring more than 120 others.
An Air India Boeing 747 flight crashed into the Arabian Sea in 1978, killing all 213 aboard.
The carrier was under government control from 1953 through 2022.
The Boeing 787 went into service in 2009. This was the first crash of the model, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.
The 787 Dreamliner was the first airliner to make extensive use of lithium ion batteries, which are lighter, recharge faster and can hold more energy than other types of batteries. In 2013 the 787 fleet was temporarily grounded because of overheating of its lithium-ion batteries, which in some cases sparked fires.
There was no information yet about possible causes of the crash. Authorities were searching the crash site Friday as part of the investigation, and there was no word whether the plane's black boxes — the flight data and cockpit voice recorders — had been recovered.
Crash investigators are likely looking at whether the plane was configured correctly for takeoff, whether the engines lost power during takeoff and whether the crew inputted information correctly about the hot temperature outside as well as the weight of the fuel and passengers. Aviation safety consultant Jeff Guzzetti said a mistake in the data the crew put into the plane’s system could result in the flaps and slats being set incorrectly.
“We can see what we see on video and all of these potential issues we’re talking about: fuel, engine thrust, settings for the flaps and slats. That’s all going to be recorded on the flight data recorder,” said Guzzetti, who is a former crash investigator for both the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration. “And the cockpit voice recorder will hopefully have the discussion between the crew on what kind of performance numbers are being put into the computer."
Of course it's still too early to know what caused the crash, but the flight data recorder that investigators have already recovered should quickly provide some answers. Another aviation consultant, John M. Cox, said the video of the last moments of the flight raises questions about whether the flaps and slats were set correctly.
“The image shows the airplane with the nose rising and it continuing to sink,’’ he said. “That says that the airplane is not making enough lift.’’
The slats and flaps should be positioned so that the wing makes more lift at lower speeds, said Cox, who is the CEO of Washington DC-based Safety Operating Systems.
“It’s hard to tell but from looking at the aircraft from behind … it doesn’t look like that the trailing edge flaps are in the position I would have expected them to be,’’ he said. “But I’m very cautious that the image quality is not good enough to make that a conclusion. It’s just an area where I know that they’re going to look.’’
Klug reported from Tokyo. Associated Press writer Josh Funk contributed to this report from Omaha, Nebraska.
Firefighters work 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)
Kalpesh Bhai, whose 14-year-old brother was killed when an Air India plane crashed into a neighborhood, wails outside the autopsy room at a hospital in Ahmedabad, India, Friday, June 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
