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Transnational Thursday for June 12, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Boeing just doesn't seem to be able to catch a break.

There is a tragic crash in India with one of their 787-8. And it is nightmarish - full plane, full of fuel, just after take off crashes in residential area. There seems to be survivors which is miracle in itself.

An Air India passenger plane bound for London Gatwick crashed shortly after taking off in Ahmedabad on Thursday, leaving at least 204 people dead.

The flight was carrying 242 passengers and crew when it was involved in what the airline has called a "tragic accident" in the city in western India.

Ahmedabad's police chief told the BBC that 204 bodies had been recovered, while 41 people were being treated for injuries.

He earlier told news agencies there appeared to be no survivors from the crash, and that some local people would also have died given where the plane came down.

Details are still emerging from the scene. Here is what we know so far.

As always for plane crashes pprune is the source for latest news, speculations, bickering, wild theories

https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-crash-near-ahmedabad-7.html

Scary and sad stuff.

Didn't know people could survive being inside massive fireballs though.

People sometimes survive absolutely unbelievable stuff because bodies just happened be in just the right way. And sometimes they die because their body has a mild shock in a very unlucky way.

The universe is capricious.

There's a lot of surprising survivals in takeoff and landing crashes: Northwest 255 is a pretty (in)famous takeoff misconfiguration that managed to kill more people than were on the flight and had one survivor.

It's early so things are still confusing, but there are reports that he was in 11A. That's right by the emergency exit. He opened it and jumped out before the crash.

I don't buy it. He'd have to time the jump perfectly and then there's still a lot of "how did you avoid debris / fuel / landing on something hard"

Somebody has to be the one in a million. Guy might just have gotten extremely lucky.

Movie main character stuff.

Didn't know people could survive being inside massive fireballs though.

Human bodies are amazing in pulling miracles of survival.

Exactly. With enough of air travel and air travel accidents, it's not extremely surprising that surprising coincidences happen now and then. In 1970s a Serbian stewardess reportedly survived after aircraft exploded midair. ("Air safety investigators attributed Vulović's survival to her being trapped by a food trolley in the DC-9's fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground.")