Inside the cockpit of the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, the two pilots may have already known that they were doomed to die.
Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, and co-pilot Clive Kundar, still following protocol, and perhaps out of sheer desperation, issued the mayday call.
Their efforts were in vain, though. The London-bound plane they were flying, carrying 242 souls, hit a building just a mile ahead of the end of the runway and split into two in a violent smash.
Witnesses of the deadly crash could do nothing but watch in horror as a fireball, fuelled by enough kerosene to carry a plane from the Indian city of Ahmedabad to London Gatwick on a non-stop nine hour and 50 minute journey, towered above them.
As plumes of acrid, black smoke billowed above Ahmedabad today, horror spread across the city after people realised that a plane had crashed into the dense residential area of Meghani Nagar less than a minute after taking off from a nearby airport.
