CHENNAI: Hours before an Air India Dreamliner crashed near Ahmedabad airport, a passenger who had flown the same aircraft from Delhi to Ahmedabad took to X to complain not about turbulence or engine trouble, but about a broken entertainment screen.
Akash Vatsa, who posted a video tagging Air India on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), wrote: “I was in the same damn flight 2 hours before it took off from AMD. I came in this from DEL-AMD. Noticed unusual things in the plane. Made a video to tweet.” His clip showed non-functional features in the seat’s in-flight entertainment system, a dead remote and a blank screen.
Two hours later, the same Boeing 787 (VT-ANB), carrying 242 passengers and 12 crew, crashed just beyond the Ahmedabad airport perimeter shortly after takeoff for London, possibly killing almost everyone on board in one of the country's worst air disasters.
A quick scroll through Vatsa’s X handle shows he’s no stranger to customer service complaints, often tagging entities like Standard Chartered and India Post.