It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, June 13, 2025
Have female earwigs evolved their forceps as weapons in battles for mates?
Female earwigs may use their forceps as weapons too—just like males
A new study from Toho University reveals that female earwigs exhibit a similar pattern of exaggerated forceps growth as males, suggesting that both sexes may have evolved these traits through sexual selection.
Do larger male elk have proportionally larger antlers? The answer is no. In fact, larger individuals tend to have disproportionately larger antlers—a phenomenon known as positive allometry. This pattern, where certain body parts grow disproportionately large relative to body size, is observed not only in mammals but also in animals such as beetles and fiddler crabs. Evolutionary biologists interpret such traits as evidence of sexual selection—a process in which physical features evolve because they offer an advantage in competing for mates.
Male earwigs are known to show positive allometry in their forceps—pincer-like appendages at the tip of the abdomen—which are believed to have evolved as weapons in battles with rivals. But what about females? Female earwigs also have forceps—so what purpose do they serve?
Tomoki Matsuzawa (then an undergraduate) and Associate Professor Junji Konuma from Toho University’s Department of Biology conducted the first quantitative study of female earwig forceps. Using morphometric analysis on the maritime earwigs Anisolabis maritima, they found that female forceps also display positive allometry—suggesting that they, too, may have evolved through sexual selection.
The team measured the head, thorax, abdomen, and bilateral forceps dimensions and analyzed shape differences in both sexes. They found that males have thick, short, and curved forceps, while females have thin, long, and straight ones—indicating clear sexual dimorphism. When they plotted body size against forceps width and length on a log–log scale, the results revealed a pattern of positive allometry in males: forceps width increased disproportionately with body size. Surprisingly, positive allometry was also found in females—in the length of the forceps. These results suggest that while the sexes differ in forceps shape, both may have evolved them as weapons—albeit in different ways.
Associate Professor Konuma explains:“A previous behavioral study has shown that female earwigs compete for small, non-aggressive males. Our findings suggest that female forceps may have evolved as effective weapons in such competition. While most earlier research focused only on males, our study highlights the importance of considering female traits as well when studying the evolution of insect morphologies.”
These findings were published on June 12, 2025, in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.
Among the tens of thousands of ant species, incredible ‘intelligent’ behaviors like crop culture, animal husbandry, surgery, ‘piracy’, social distancing, and complex architecture have evolved. Yet at first sight, the brain of an ant seems hardly capable of such feats: it is about the size of a poppy seed, with only 0.25m to 1m neurons, compared to 86bn for humans. Now, researchers from Israel and Switzerland have shown how ‘swarm intelligence’ resembling advance planning can nevertheless emerge from the concerted operation of many of these tiny brains. The results are published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
“Here we show for the first time that workers of the longhorn crazy ant can clear obstacles from a path before they become a problem – anticipating where a large food item will need to go and preparing the way in advance. This is the first documented case of ants showing such forward-looking behavior during cooperative transport,” said Dr Ehud Fonio, a research fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and the corresponding author of the study.
‘I can see all obstacles in my way’
The researchers were inspired when they made a fascinating chance observation in nature: individual crazy ant workers used their mandibles to pick up and carry away tiny gravel pebbles near groups of workers cooperating to transport large insect prey.
“When we first saw ants clearing small obstacles ahead of the moving load we were in awe. It appeared as if these tiny creatures understand the difficulties that lie ahead and try to help their friends in advance,” said Dr Ofer Feinerman, a professor at the Weizmann Institute, and the study’s final author.
Fonio et al. designed a suite of 83 experiments to study this obstacle-clearing behavior on a single crazy ant ‘supercolony’ on the Weizmann Institute’s campus. For pebbles, they used plastic beads with a diameter of 1.5 millimeter (half the body length of the ants) to block the ants’ route. For prey, they used pellets of cat food, of which the ants are fond.
Triggered into clearing mode by pheromones
Like many ant species, crazy ants are known to alert their sisters to the presence of large food items by laying odor trails: running erratically (hence their ‘crazy’ name), they touch the ground with the tip of their abdomen every 0.2 seconds to deposit a tiny droplet of a pheromone. This pheromone swiftly attracts other workers to the food. But here, the scientists found this pheromone to play a key role in clearing behavior as well.
Their observations showed that workers were most prone to clear beads that lay approximately 40mm away from food towards the direction of the nest. They moved these beads for up to 50mm before dropping them, away from the route leading back to the nest. The record holder cleared 64 beads in succession.
Such clearing behavior always occurred when the pellet was whole, but rarely when it was divided into crumbs. This distinction seemed adaptive, as the observations showed that crumbs were always carried home by single workers, who would simply walk around any beads in their path. Intact pellets, however, always prompted ‘cooperative’ transport by multiple workers, who typically remained stalled by a grid of beads until these were cleared.
That the beads were a real hindrance was also clear from the time that cooperative transport took to pass through a 5cm by 7cm tunnel: this was 18 times longer when the passage was filled with beads than when it was free of obstacles.
Further observations also revealed that workers didn’t need to be in contact with the food to start clearing behavior: they were prompted to do so by pheromones deposited by foragers. A single mark that happened to be near a bead was sufficient to put a worker in ‘clearing mode’, after which they would actively look for more beads to clear.
‘Awe-inspiring’
“Taken together, these results imply that our initial impression was wrong: in reality, individual workers don’t understand the situation at all. This intelligent behavior happens at the level of the colony, not the individual. Each ant follows simple cues – like fresh scent marks left by others – without needing to understand the bigger picture, yet together they create a smart, goal-directed outcome,” concluded Dr Danielle Mersch, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at the same institute.
“We find this to be even more awe-inspiring than our initial guess,” said Feinerman.
“Humans think ahead by imagining future events in their minds; ants don’t do that. But by interacting through chemical signals and shared actions, ant colonies can behave in surprisingly smart ways – achieving tasks that look planned, even though no single ant is doing the planning. These ants thus provide us an analogy to brains, where from the activity of the relatively simple computational units, namely neurons, some high cognition capabilities miraculously emerge.”
Ants engaged in cooperative food transport show anticipatory and nest-oriented clearing of the obstacles surrounding the food: goal-directed behavior emerging from collective cognition
Article Publication Date
13-Jun-2025
AI-enabled control system helps autonomous drones stay on target in uncertain environments
The system automatically learns to adapt to unknown disturbances such as gusting winds
Cambridge, MA – An autonomous drone carrying water to help extinguish a wildfire in the Sierra Nevada might encounter swirling Santa Ana winds that threaten to push it off course. Rapidly adapting to these unknown disturbances inflight presents an enormous challenge for the drone’s flight control system.
To help such a drone stay on target, MIT researchers developed a new, machine learning-based adaptive control algorithm that could minimize its deviation from its intended trajectory in the face of unpredictable forces like gusty winds.
Unlike standard approaches, the new technique does not require the person programming the autonomous drone to know anything in advance about the structure of these uncertain disturbances. Instead, the control system’s artificial intelligence model learns all it needs to know from a small amount of observational data collected from 15 minutes of flight time.
Importantly, the technique automatically determines which optimization algorithm it should use to adapt to the disturbances, which improves tracking performance. It chooses the algorithm that best suits the geometry of specific disturbances this drone is facing.
The researchers train their control system to do both things simultaneously using a technique called meta-learning, which teaches the system how to adapt to different types of disturbances.
Taken together, these ingredients enable their adaptive control system to achieve 50 percent less trajectory tracking error than baseline methods in simulations and perform better with new wind speeds it didn’t see during training.
In the future, this adaptive control system could help autonomous drones more efficiently deliver heavy parcels despite strong winds or monitor fire-prone areas of a national park.
“The concurrent learning of these components is what gives our method its strength. By leveraging meta-learning, our controller can automatically make choices that will be best for quick adaptation,” says Navid Azizan, who is the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), a principal investigator of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and the senior author of a paper on this control system.
Azizan is joined on the paper by lead author Sunbochen Tang, a graduate student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Haoyuan Sun, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The research was recently presented at the Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference.
Finding the right algorithm
Typically, a control system incorporates a function that models the drone and its environment, and includes some existing information on the structure of potential disturbances. But in a real world filled with uncertain conditions, it is often impossible to hand-design this structure in advance.
Many control systems use an adaptation method based on a popular optimization algorithm, known as gradient descent, to estimate the unknown parts of the problem and determine how to keep the drone as close as possible to its target trajectory during flight. However, gradient descent is only one algorithm in a larger family of algorithms available to choose, known as mirror descent.
“Mirror descent is a general family of algorithms, and for any given problem, one of these algorithms can be more suitable than others. The name of the game is how to choose the particular algorithm that is right for your problem. In our method, we automate this choice,” Azizan says.
In their control system, the researchers replaced the function that contains some structure of potential disturbances with a neural network model that learns to approximate them from data. In this way, they don’t need to have an a priori structure of the wind speeds this drone could encounter in advance.
Their method also uses an algorithm to automatically select the right mirror-descent function while learning the neural network model from data, rather than assuming a user has the ideal function picked out already. The researchers give this algorithm a range of functions to pick from, and it finds the one that best fits the problem at hand.
“Choosing a good distance-generating function to construct the right mirror-descent adaptation matters a lot in getting the right algorithm to reduce the tracking error,” Tang adds.
Learning to adapt
While the wind speeds the drone may encounter could change every time it takes flight, the controller’s neural network and mirror function should stay the same so they don’t need to be recomputed each time.
To make their controller more flexible, the researchers use meta-learning, teaching it to adapt by showing it a range of wind speed families during training.
“Our method can cope with different objectives because, using meta-learning, we can learn a shared representation through different scenarios efficiently from data,” Tang explains.
In the end, the user feeds the control system a target trajectory and it continuously recalculates, in real-time, how the drone should produce thrust to keep it as close as possible to that trajectory while accommodating the uncertain disturbance it encounters.
In both simulations and real-world experiments, the researchers showed that their method led to significantly less trajectory tracking error than baseline approaches with every wind speed they tested.
“Even if the wind disturbances are much stronger than we had seen during training, our technique shows that it can still handle them successfully,” Azizan adds.
In addition, the margin by which their method outperformed the baselines grew as the wind speeds intensified, showing that it can adapt to challenging environments.
The team is now performing hardware experiments to test their control system on real drones with varying wind conditions and other disturbances.
They also want to extend their method so it can handle disturbances from multiple sources at once. For instance, changing wind speeds could cause the weight of a parcel the drone is carrying to shift in flight, especially when the drone is carrying sloshing payloads.
They also want to explore continual learning, so the drone could adapt to new disturbances without the need to also be retrained on the data it has seen so far.
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This research was supported, in part, by MathWorks, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT-Amazon Science Hub, and the MIT-Google Program for Computing Innovation.
Study suggests that appetite for bushmeat – rather than black market for scales to use in traditional Chinese medicine – may be driving West Africa’s illegal hunting of one of the world’s most threatened mammals.
Interviews with hundreds of hunters show pangolins overwhelmingly caught for food, with majority of scales thrown away. Survey work shows pangolin is considered the most palatable meat in the region.
The vast majority of pangolin hunting in African forest landscapes is done for meat consumed by people in the region, rather than for scales shipped to East Asia, a new study led by the University of Cambridge suggests.
Pangolins are the most heavily trafficked wild mammal in the world. A solitary, insect-eating animal about the size of a large domestic cat*, pangolins are famous for their highly prized keratin scales – a staple of traditional Chinese medicine.
All eight existing pangolin species are threatened with extinction and on the IUCN’s Red List, with three Asian species categorised as critically endangered.
As Asian pangolins have declined dramatically, Nigeria has seen a boom in the export of pangolin scales to Asia. While hunting pangolins is illegal in Nigeria the West African country is now the world’s largest hub for the criminal trade in pangolin products.
However, a new study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution suggests that some 98% of Nigerian pangolins are caught for meat first and foremost, with around two-thirds of scales from these animals simply thrown away.
A research team led by Cambridge collected data from over eight hundred hunters and traders in thirty-three locations across Nigeria’s Cross River Forest region, primarily between 2020 and 2023, during which time the conservationists estimate that around 21,000 pangolins were killed annually in the area.
Almost all pangolins were captured “opportunistically” or during general hunting trips (97%) rather than sought out, and caught primarily for meat (98%). Around 71% of pangolins were consumed by hunters themselves, with 27% traded locally as food.
Perhaps surprisingly, given their potential overseas value, around 70% of the scales were discarded, while less than 30% were sold on. However, researchers calculated that, per animal, pangolin meat fetched 3-4 times the price of scales at local Nigerian markets.
“Thousands of kilos of pangolin scales are seized at Nigeria’s ports, creating the impression that the international demand for scales is behind pangolin exploitation in West Africa,” said study lead author and Gates Cambridge Scholar Dr Charles Emogor, who conducted the research for his PhD at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.
“When we spoke to hunters and traders on the ground around the Cross River forest, the largest stronghold for Nigeria’s pangolins, it was obvious that meat was the motivation for almost all of the pangolin killings.”
“We found that dedicated pangolin hunts are virtually non-existent. Most pangolins are killed by hunters out for any type of game,” said Emogor, now a Schmidt Science Fellow split between Cambridge, UK, and Harvard, US.
“Around a third of pangolins are caught opportunistically, often while people are working in the fields. Pangolins curl into a ball when threatened, which sadly makes them easy to catch.” Among frequent hunters, by far the most common method of catching pangolins was given as simply picking them up by hand.
While Emogor says the demands of traditional medicine markets are exacerbating the decline of African pangolins – his previous research showed that just shipments intercepted by Nigerian authorities between 2010 and 2021 amounted to 190,407 kilos of pangolin scales taken from around 800,000 dead creatures – pangolins have been exploited in West Africa long before being trafficked to Asia.
The meat is a delicacy in parts of Nigeria, often procured for pregnant women in the belief it helps produce strong babies. Emogor and colleagues surveyed hunters and Cross River locals on “palatability”: asking them to rank the tastiness of almost a hundred different animals eaten in the region, from domestic beef and chicken to catfish, monkeys and antelope.
The three major African pangolin species were rated as the most palatable of all available meats, with average scores of almost nine out of ten, and the giant pangolin considered the topmost appetising meat in the region.
“Pangolins face a lethal combination of threats,” said Emogor. “Pangolins are easy to hunt, breed slowly, taste good to humans, and are falsely believed to have curative properties in traditional medicines. In addition, their forest habitat is being destroyed.”
Emogor’s research led him to set up Pangolino in 2021, a global network of volunteers, scientists and pangolin enthusiasts committed to saving the endangered animal. He points out that the cost of policy interventions to tackle meat-driven pangolin trading might be cheaper than those for an international scales market.
These should include anti-poaching patrols as well as community programmes focused on food security. Through Pangolino, Emogor is piloting interventions in four Southeast Nigerian communities by helping create by-laws that prohibit pangolin killing, with financial rewards for compliance.
“Clearly in designing any intervention we need good information on what’s motivating the hunters,” said Prof Andrew Balmford, co-author from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. “That’s why studies such as this are vital for effective conservation of endangered species.”
While the latest study focused on Nigeria, researchers say their pangolin hunting and consumption data echo that from countries such as Cameroon and Gabon – suggesting these patterns may be Africa-wide.
Raised on the edge of the Cross River National Park, home to Nigeria’s endangered white-bellied and black-bellied pangolins, Emogor grew up surrounded by wildlife. Yet during childhood he only ever saw dead pangolins, and didn’t encounter a living animal until his mid-twenties.
"If we lose the pangolin, we lose 80 million years of evolution,” said Emogor. “Pangolins are the only mammals with scales, and their ancestors existed when dinosaurs still roamed the planet," added Emogor.
The latest study was conducted by an international team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, Wildlife Conservation Society, Pangolin Protection Network, University of Washington, CIFOR, CARE International, as well as the UK universities of Oxford, Exeter and Kent.
Notes:
*While this is a rough size for some African species, such as the White-bellied pangolin, the Giant Pangolin can grow up to 30kg in weight.
Two pangolin carcasses alongside other animals bound for wild meat markets.
White-bellied pangolins captured in southeastern Nigeria and destined for trade.
Charles Emogor holding a white-bellied pangolin retrieved from a hunter who participated in the study.
Credit
Alex Moore
Aerial view of Cross River National Park.
Charles Emogor with a white-bellied pangolin captured by a hunter who participated in the study.
The agency said the number of people displaced by war, violence and persecution worldwide was 'untenably high' - Copyright Japan's Ministry of Defense/AFP Handout
The number of people forcibly displaced from their homes worldwide has dropped slightly from a record high but remains “untenably high”, the United Nations said Thursday.
A record 123.2 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced from their homes at the end of 2024, said UNHCR, the UN refugee agency.
But that figure dropped to 122.1 million by the end of April this year, as Syrians began returning home after years of turmoil.
Nearly two million Syrians have been able to return home from abroad or from displacement within the war-ravaged country.
But the UNHCR warned that how major conflicts worldwide played out would determine whether the figure would rise once again.
The agency said the number of people displaced by war, violence and persecution worldwide was “untenably high”, particularly in a period when humanitarian funding is evaporating.
“We are living in a time of intense volatility in international relations, with modern warfare creating a fragile, harrowing landscape marked by acute human suffering,” said Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
“We must redouble our efforts to search for peace and find long-lasting solutions for refugees and others forced to flee their homes.”
– Sudan overtakes Syria –
The main drivers of displacement remain sprawling conflicts like those in Sudan, Myanmar and Ukraine, UNHCR said in its flagship annual Global Trends Report.
Syria’s brutal civil war erupted in 2011 but president Bashar al-Assad was finally overthrown in December 2024.
The report said the first months of this year saw rising numbers of Syrians returning home.
As of mid-May, more than 500,000 Syrians are estimated to have crossed back into the country since the fall of Assad, while an estimated 1.2 million internally displaced people (IDPs) have returned to their areas of origin since the end of November.
UNHCR estimates that up to 1.5 million Syrians from abroad and two million IDPs may return by the end of 2025.
Sudan is now the world’s largest forced displacement situation with 14.3 million refugees and IDPs, overtaking Syria (13.5 million), which is followed by Afghanistan (10.3 million) and Ukraine (8.8 million).
“During the remainder of 2025, much will depend on the dynamics in key situations,” the annual report said.
“This includes whether peace, or at least a cessation in fighting, is possible to achieve, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Ukraine.”
It also depends on whether conditions for returns improve in Afghanistan and Syria.
Another factor was “how dire the impact of the current funding cuts will be” on responding to displacement and creating conditions for safe and dignified returns.
– One in 67 –
The number of people forced to flee persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and events seriously disturbing public order has almost doubled in the last decade.
The figure of 123.2 million worldwide at the end of last year was up seven million compared to the end of 2023.
“One in 67 people globally were forcibly displaced at the end of 2024,” UNHCR said.
In total, 9.8 million forcibly displaced people returned home in 2024, including 1.6 million refugees — the most for more than two decades — and 8.2 million IDPs — the second highest ever.
“We have seen some rays of hope over the last six months,” said Grandi.
But countries such as the DR Congo, Myanmar and South Sudan saw significant new forced displacements as well as returns.
Two-thirds of refugees stay in neighbouring countries.
Iran (3.5 million), Turkey (2.9 million), Colombia (2.8 million), Germany (2.7 million) and Uganda (1.8 million) host the largest refugee populations.
Volunteer rescuers describe horror at India plane crash site
Many of the first responders at the crash site were volunteers workimng in the neighbourhood - Copyright AFP Sam PANTHAKY
Aishwarya KUMAR
Volunteers who rushed to help after a passenger jet crashed into a residential neighbourhood of India’s Ahmedabad city described Friday the intense fireball they faced — and the challenge ahead to identify the bodies of at least 265 victims.
Bharat Solanki, 51, was working at a fuel station when the Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner — carrying 242 passengers and crew — took off from nearby Ahmedabad airport around lunchtime on Thursday.
Less than a minute later it ploughed into a residential area, bursting into searing flames with what residents described as an ear-splitting blast.
All but one aboard the plane was killed, and at least 24 others died on the ground.
Solanki and a couple of friends rushed to the site.
“We saw bodies everywhere — they were in pieces, fully burnt,” he said, recalling the horror of the scene.
“We took out dead bodies”, he said, adding that he also helped bring out those injured from the medical hostel and nearby buildings that the plane smashed into.
“Everywhere just bodies, parts, body parts. The bodies were totally burnt. It was like coal.”
– ‘Didn’t get a chance’ –
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who visited the crash site on Friday morning, called it a “scene of devastation”.
He was seen peering up at a fire-blackened multi-storey building with the plane’s wheels and tail embedded in a wall.
Authorities have set up DNA testing for relatives of passengers and those killed on the ground to identify the scorched bodies and body parts.
It may be weeks before a final death toll is confirmed.
Home Minister Amit Shah, speaking after visiting the crash site on Thursday, said the plane was carrying 125,000 litres (27,500 gallons) of fuel.
The “temperature was so high that one didn’t get a chance”, he said.
Air India said there were 169 Indian passengers, 53 British, seven Portuguese, and a Canadian on board the flight bound for London’s Gatwick airport, as well as 12 crew members.
Sona Prakash, who was close to the residential blocks of the medical accommodation, described how the “hostel was destroyed”, adding that “so many doctors were injured, so many died”.
Another witness, 35-year-old labourer Patani, who uses only one name, said those around him thought a bomb had gone off before they realised it was a plane crash.
“There was black smoke everywhere, plumes of smoke”, added Vinod Bhai, another labourer.
“The sky was only black, that’s how much smoke was there.”
Forensic teams are searching for the black box flight recorders that will detail the last moments of the flight for crash investigators. India plane crash: What we know so far
Authorities don't believe any of the 242 people on an Air India flight survived a plane crash - Copyright AFP Sam PANTHAKY
A London-bound Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner carrying 242 people crashed on Thursday in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, with all passengers and crew believed killed.
Here’s what we know so far:
– What happened? –
The Gatwick Airport-bound plane left Ahmedabad, the main city of India’s Gujarat state, with 242 people on board.
Air India’s flight 171 issued a mayday call and crashed “immediately after takeoff”, around 1:40 pm (0810 GMT), the Directorate General of Civil Aviation said.
Several videos posted on social media, which AFP was not able to immediately verify, showed an aircraft rapidly losing altitude — with its nose up — before it hit a building and exploded into a ball of fire.
Air India said the passengers included 169 Indians, 53 Britons, seven Portuguese nationals and a Canadian. Two pilots and 10 cabin crew were also aboard.
– Scenes of horror –
The plane smashed into a building in a crowded residential area of Ahmedabad, a city home to about eight million people.
At the site of the crash, an AFP journalist saw people recovering bodies and firefighters trying to douse the smouldering wreckage.
A resident, who declined to be named, said: “We saw people from the building jumping from the second and third floor to save themselves. The plane was in flames.”
“When we reached the spot there were several bodies lying around and firefighters were dousing the flames,” another resident, Poonam Patni, told AFP, adding that many of the bodies were burned.
– ‘No survivor’ –
A city police commissioner told AFP there “appears to be no survivor” and that since the plane had crashed in a residential area, he expected “more casualties”.
India’s aviation ministry deployed all aviation and emergency response agencies “to take swift and coordinated action”.
The airport was shut with all flights suspended until further notice.
The airline’s chairman, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, said an emergency centre had been activated and a support team set up for families seeking information.
– Boeing investigating the incident –
US planemaker Boeing said it was “working to gather more information” on the incident and that it was ready to support Air India.
A source close to the case said this was the first time a 787 Dreamliner had crashed.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is the pride of the US company’s catalog for long-distance planes: a fuel-efficient, wide-body, lightweight aircraft able to transport up to 330 people.
Air India ordered 100 more Airbus planes last year after a giant contract in 2023 for 470 aircraft — 250 Airbus and 220 Boeing. Flames and smoke in aftermath of crashed India passenger jet
This handout picturfrom the Central Industrial Security Force shows the tailpiece of the plane jutting from a building - Copyright CENTRAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY FORCE (CISF)/AFP Handout
Thick black plumes of acrid smoke towered high above India’s Ahmedabad airport Thursday after a London-bound passenger jet with 242 people aboard crashed shortly after takeoff on Thursday.
Several videos posted on social media, which AFP was not able to immediately verify, showed an aircraft rapidly losing altitude — with its nose up — before it hit a building and exploded into an orange ball of fire.
An AFP reporter in the city said the plane crashed in an area between a hospital and the city’s Ghoda Camp neighbourhood.
Authorities said it went down outside the airport perimeter, in a crowded residential area, which local media said included a hostel where medical students and young doctors live.
“When we reached the spot there were several bodies lying around and firefighters were dousing the flames,” Poonam Patni told AFP.
“Many of the bodies were burned.”
Another resident, who declined to be named, said: “We saw people from the building jumping from the second and third floor to save themselves. The plane was in flames.
“We helped people get out of the building and sent the injured to the hospital.”
Air India’s flight 171 — a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner bound for London’s Gatwick Airport, crashed shortly after takeoff around 1:40 pm (0810 GMT), officials said.
The passengers included 169 Indian nationals, 53 British, seven Portuguese, and a Canadian. Two pilots and 10 cabin crew were also aboard.
– ‘Massive sound’ –
At the crash site, firefighters could be seen trying to control flames on the burning plane debris that also charred trees.
One video, from social media but posted by the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency, showed what appeared to be a chunk of fuselage — larger than a car — that had smashed onto the roof of a multi-storey building.
Photographs released by India’s Central Industrial Security Force, a paramilitary police force, showed a large chunk of the plane that had smashed through the brick and concrete wall of a building.
“I was at home when we heard a massive sound,” one Ahmedabad resident told PTI.
“When we went out to see what had happened, there was a layer of thick smoke in the air. When we came here, dead bodies and debris from the crashed aircraft were scattered all over.”
Outside Ahmedabad airport, a woman wailing inconsolably in grief said that five of her relatives had been aboard the plane.
Rescue teams comb site of Air India crash that killed at least 265
The tailpiece of the crashed Air India Dreamliner juts from a building in Ahmedabad - Copyright AFP Sam PANTHAKY
Aishwarya KUMAR
Rescue teams with sniffer dogs combed the crash site Friday of a London-bound passenger jet which ploughed into a residential area of India’s Ahmedabad city, killing at least 265 people on board and on the ground.
One man aboard the Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner — carrying 242 passengers and crew — miraculously survived Thursday’s fiery crash, which left the tailpiece of the aircraft jutting out of the second floor of a hostel for medical staff from a nearby hospital.
The nose and front wheel landed on a canteen building where students were having lunch, witnesses said.
Deputy Commissioner of Police Kanan Desai said that 265 bodies had so far been counted — suggesting at least 24 people died on the ground — but the toll may rise as more bodies and body parts are recovered.
“The official number of deceased will be declared only after DNA testing is completed”, Home Minister Amit Shah said in a statement late Thursday, adding that “families whose relatives are abroad have already been informed, and their DNA samples will be taken”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the crash of Air India flight 171 as “heartbreaking beyond words”.
The airline said there were 169 Indian passengers, 53 British, seven Portuguese, and a Canadian on board the flight bound for London’s Gatwick airport, as well as 12 crew members.
Air India said the sole survivor from the plane — a British national of Indian origin who local media named as Vishwash Kumar Ramesh — was being treated in hospital.
“He said, ‘I have no idea how I exited the plane'”, his brother Nayan Kumar Ramesh, 27, told Britain’s Press Association in Leicester.
– ‘Last call –
In Ahmedabad, disconsolate relatives of passengers gathered Friday at an emergency centre to give DNA samples so their loved ones could be identified.
Ashfaque Nanabawa, 40, said he had come to find his cousin Akeel Nanabawa, who had been aboard with his wife and three-year-old daughter. They had spoken as his cousin sat in the plane, just before takeoff.
“He called us and he said: ‘I am in the plane and I have boarded safely and everything was okay’. That was his last call.”
One woman, too grief-stricken to give her name, said her son-in-law had been killed.
“My daughter doesn’t know that he’s no more”, she said, wiping away tears.
“I can’t break the news to her, can someone else do that please?”
The plane crashed less than a minute after takeoff, around lunchtime Thursday, after lifting barely 100 metres from the ground.
The plane issued a mayday call and “crashed immediately after takeoff”, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation said.
Ahmedabad, the main city in India’s Gujarat state, is home to around eight million people and its busy airport is surrounded by densely packed residential areas.
“One half of the plane crashed into the residential building where doctors lived with their families,” said Krishna, a doctor who did not give his full name.
US planemaker Boeing said it was in touch with Air India and stood “ready to support them” over the incident, which a source close to the case said was the first crash for a 787 Dreamliner.
The UK and US air accident investigation agencies announced they were dispatching teams to support their Indian counterparts.
Tata Group, owners of Air India, offered financial aid of 10 million rupees ($117,000) to “the families of each person who has lost their life in this tragedy”, as well as funds to cover medical expenses of those injured.
– Rapid growth –
India has suffered a series of fatal air crashes, including a 1996 disaster when two jets collided mid-air over New Delhi, killing nearly 350 people.
In 2010, an Air India Express jet crashed and burst into flames at Mangalore airport in southwest India, killing 158 of the 166 passengers and crew on board.
Experts said it was too early to speculate on what may have caused Thursday’s crash.
“It is very unlikely that the plane was overweight or carrying too much fuel,” said Jason Knight, senior lecturer in fluid mechanics at the University of Portsmouth.
“The aircraft is designed to be able to fly on one engine, so the most likely cause of the crash is a double engine failure. The most likely cause of a double engine failure is a bird strike.”
India’s airline industry has boomed in recent years with Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), last month calling it “nothing short of phenomenal”.
The growth of its economy has made India and its 1.4 billion people the world’s fourth-largest air market — domestic and international — with IATA projecting it will become the third biggest within the decade.
