Boeing Air India crash: Funerals for 279 victims begin this Sunday in India

"It's a methodical and slow process, so it must be carried out meticulously," he explained the day before, adding that the majority of those injured on the ground had been released from the hospital and one or two were still in intensive care. A relative of one victim, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the families had been asked not to open the coffin. Witnesses reported seeing some charred bodies or scattered human remains.

"My heart is very heavy" at the thought of returning them to their families, said Tushar Leuva, who works for an NGO helping to return the bodies. "How will they react when they open the door?" he wondered outside the morgue Saturday evening. Only one passenger survived from the 242 people on board the Air India Boeing 787 when it crashed on takeoff from Ahmedabad on Thursday, according to the latest figures released Saturday.

A black box found

Thirty-eight city residents were killed on the ground when the plane exploded in an orange fireball over a city neighborhood. Among the passengers was Arjun Patoliya, a father of two young girls, who had gone to India to scatter the ashes of his wife, who had died a few weeks earlier. "I really hope we all look after these girls," said Anjana Patel, mayor of the London borough of Harrow, where some of the victims lived.

A woman who arrived late at the airport survived. "Check-in was already closed," Bhoomi Chauhan, 28, told the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency. She remembers thinking, "If only we had left a little earlier, we wouldn't have missed our flight."

This air disaster is already the deadliest in the world since the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, shot down by a missile over Ukraine in 2014 while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur (298 victims, including 193 Dutch nationals). Investigators recovered one of the two black boxes from the Air India plane on Friday, the flight data recorder, and continued to search the site on Saturday for the second, the cockpit voice recorder. This black box will provide "considerable assistance" to the investigation, Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said on Saturday.

"How I got out of all that alive"

Air India Flight 171 crashed at 1:39 p.m. Thursday, less than a minute after takeoff from London's Gatwick Airport, according to the Indian Civil Aviation Authority. It had issued a distress call almost immediately after leaving the ground, before crashing into a residential area of ​​Ahmedabad beyond the airport. According to the Indian Civil Aviation Authority, the Boeing 787 had 230 passengers on board—169 Indians, 53 British, 7 Portuguese, and one Canadian—and 12 crew members.

Only one of the passengers seated at the front of the plane miraculously survived the crash and was able to extricate himself from its wreckage, injured. "I still can't believe how I managed to get out of all that alive," Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British man of Indian origin, told Indian television. According to a source close to the case, this crash was the first of a Boeing B-787 Dreamliner, a long-haul aircraft that entered service in 2011. British and American investigative agencies announced they were sending teams to assist their Indian counterparts in the investigation.