Captain Kishore Chinta, a former investigator with India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), calls this "the rarest of the rare" crashes - a controlled flight into terrain just 30 seconds after take-off. "To my knowledge, nothing quite like this has ever happened," he told the BBC.

An Air India jet flying from Ahmedabad to London crashed shortly after takeoff into a fireball with 242 people aboard.

The deadly crash of Air India Flight 171 last week has centered renewed scrutiny on the airplane's manufacturer, Boeing. This time it's the 787 Dreamliner in investigators' sights. The accident, which killed over 270 people, was the first fatal crash for the Dreamliner since the model began flying in 2011.