It is not just passengers' families that have been devastated by the plane crash in Gujarat on Thursday. The lives of the near and dear ones of the crew members will also never be the same again.
Air India’s Ahmedabad-London Gatwick flight AI171 had a total crew of 12 for the nine-hour-plus journey. It was headed by Captain Sumeet Sabharwal (55), who’s been with the airline for three decades. He hailed from the Powai suburb of Mumbai.
In fact, out of the 12 crew members, the majority were based in Mumbai, while two were from Manipur – cabin crew members Kongroilatpam Nganthoi Sharma from Thoubal district and Singson Lamnunthem from Churachandpur district.
The cabin crew members included Saineeta Chakravarti (34), Aparna Mahadik (40), Deepak Pathak (35), Roshni Songhare (27), Maithili Patil (22), Manisha Thapa and Irfan Sheikh (NA) and Shradha Dhawan (44) who was the cabin supervisor.
Captail Sabharwal had 8,000 flying hours, and was an instructor pilot with the airline, according to some reports. There were comments raised on social media over the low flying hours of the co-pilot Clive Kunder (32), who had just above one thousand flying hours.
Actor Vikrant Massey first took to social media to grieve the death of Kunder, calling him the son of his uncle Clifford Kunder. “It pains even more to know that my uncle Clifford Kunder lost his son Clive Kunder.”
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However, in a curious twist, perhaps after many news outlets reported that Massey had lost his cousin, Massey later in the night clarified that Clive was not his cousin and that by calling Clifford ‘Uncle’ he had meant that they were ‘family friends’, as Indians are wont to call senior family friends uncle and aunty.
One of the crew members, Roshni, was a former model and a social media influencer, with a huge following on Instagram alone. She used to post photos and videos from her trips to exotic destinations as a flight attendant. A recent one poignantly has her enjoying tulips and sashaying through the streets of London, a city she could have been enjoying a few hours later, if only fate did not have other plans.
