AHMEDABAD: More than 200 people were killed when an Air India plane bound for London with 242 people on board crashed minutes after taking off from the western city of Ahmedabad yesterday, authorities said, in the world's worst aviation disaster in a decade.
The plane came down in a residential area, crashing on to a medical college hostel outside the airport during lunch hour. It was headed for Gatwick Airport, south of the British capital.
City police chief G.S. Malik told Reuters that 204 bodies had been recovered from the crash site. There were no reports of survivors being found, and the Indian Express newspaper said all 242 on board had perished, citing police.
Malik said the bodies recovered could include both passengers and people killed on the ground. Relatives had been asked to give DNA samples to identify the dead, state health secretary Dhananjay Dwivedi said.
"The building on which it has crashed is a doctors' hostel... we have cleared almost 70% to 80% of the area and will clear the rest soon," a senior police officer told reporters.
Parts of the plane's body were scattered around the building into which it crashed, photographs and videos from the area showed. The tail of the plane was stuck on top of the building.
India's CNN News-18 TV channels said the plane crashed on top of the dining area of state-run B.J. Medical College hostel, killing many medical students as well. The passengers included 217 adults, 11 children and two infants, a source told Reuters. Of them, 169 were Indian nationals, 53 were Britons, seven Portuguese, and one Canadian, Air India said.
Aviation tracking site Flightradar24 said the plane was a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, one of the most modern passenger aircraft in service.
It was the first crash for the Dreamliner, which began flying commercially in 2011, according to the Aviation Safety Network database. The plane that crashed on Thursday flew for the first time in 2013 and was delivered to Air India in January 2014, Flightradar24 said.
"At this moment, we are ascertaining the details and will share further updates," Air India said on X.
The crash occurred just after the plane took off, television channels reported. One channel showed the plane taking off over a residential area and then disappearing from the screen before a huge jet of fire can be seen rising into the sky from beyond the houses. 
"My sister-in-law was going to London. Within an hour, I got news that the plane had crashed," Poonam Patel, a relative of one of the passengers, told news agency ANI at the government hospital in Ahmedabad.