A Mayday call is the most urgent distress signal used in aviation and maritime communication to indicate a life-threatening emergency which requires immediate assistance.

Ahmedabad plane crash is considered one of the world’s worst in aviation history. It involved a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. (Image: PTI)

Ahmedabad plane crash: As the Air India flight, AI 171, started to lose altitude moments after take-off from Ahmedabad Airport and descended at a rate of 475 feet per minute shortly after reaching 625 feet, pilot Sumeet Sabharwal and co-pilot Clive Kundar issued a “mayday” call to Air Traffic Control (ATC). However, all the attempts by ATC to communicate with the cockpit went unanswered.

Now, new details have emerged and suggest why the communication was not established. There were only 15 seconds between the “Mayday” call and the moment of impact. This extremely short window meant ATC had just 15 seconds to respond, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the investigation.

Pilot’s Mayday message

“Mayday… no thrust, losing power, unable to lift,” read Sabharwal’s last mayday message to ATC, who has over 8,200 hours of flying experience. A few seconds after this, the Air India plane crashed.

What is a Mayday call?

A Mayday call is the most urgent distress signal used in aviation and maritime communication to indicate a life-threatening emergency which requires immediate assistance.

“Mayday” comes from the French phrase m’aider, which translates in English to “help me”.

It was coined in the early 1920s by Croydon Airport’s radio officer Frederick Stanley Mockford. The word was chosen because it was easy to understand and pronounce over radio communication. By 1927, Mayday was officially adopted as the international standard voice distress call, complementing the Morse code emergency signal “SOS”.

Initial investigations into the case

India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), which is independently probing the crash, recreated the scene to better understand the possible reasons. For that, pilots used a flight simulator using the same conditions, such as landing gear being down and wing flaps pulled in. They found that these settings alone did not lead to a crash, the Bloomberg report further said.

This comes after the initial investigation into the case suggested a possible dual engine failure as the aircraft’s emergency power system, known as Ram Air Turbine (RAT), was activated by the pilots, Wall Street Journal reported citing investigators.

Since RAT was activated, it indicated that either the engine lost power or there was a complete electrical failure. While dual engine failures are extremely rare, investigators have not ruled out that possibility.

About the doomed Air India flight

The crash, considered one of the world’s worst in aviation history, involved a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The CCTV footage of the incident went viral. It shows the flight taking off from Runway 23 and beginning to descend unexpectedly. The aircraft veered over a residential area before going out of the scene. Moments later, a massive explosion was heard, and black smoke started billowing from the crash site.

The aircraft lost contact just seconds into its 4,200-mile, ten-hour journey to London’s Gatwick Airport, flight tracking data from Flightradar indicated. 241 of the 242 people aboard Flight 171 have been declared dead. Among them was former Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani.

One British national, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, survived the crash. He described the scene as “unimaginable”, saying he saw bodies scattered around him. A video of him emerging from the crash site also went viral. He was seen telling the bystanders that a plane had crashed. The ambulance driver who took him to the hospital said that he tried to go back to the crash site to find his brother who was also flying with him to London.