People stand beside the debris of an Air India plane crashed in Ahmedabad of India's Gujarat state, June 13, 2025.Photo:Xinhua

Indian Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said Saturday that the black box from the Air India plane that crashed, killing hundreds of people, has been recovered and are being decoded, as investigators work to determine the cause of the disaster, multiple media outlets reported.

The flight data recorder was recovered within 28 hours by India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), Kinjarapu confirmed, BBC reported Saturday.

All but one of the 242 people on the London-bound flight died when it crashed into a residential area less than 60 seconds after take-off on Thursday. 

"The [recovery of the black box] marks an important step forward in the investigation" and will "significantly aid the inquiry" into the disaster, Kinjarapu said.

"The decoding of this black box is going to give in-depth insight into what would have actually happened during the process of the crash, or moments before the crash," India's civil aviation minister, Kinjarapu, said in a news conference on Saturday, the New York Times (NYT) reported Saturday.

According to NYT, the aviation ministry previously announced late Friday that the government had formed a high-level investigative committee that would focus on "preventing and handling such occurrences in the future."

The Guardian reported Saturday that in the briefing by India's aviation authorities on Saturday, authorities confirmed that Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, who was piloting the flight, sent a distress call to air traffic control less a minute after it took off from Ahmedabad airport at 1:39pm on Thursday.

When air traffic control responded to the pilot's emergency mayday call, "there was no response", said Samir Kumar Sinha, a secretary for India's aviation ministry. He said the plane went down seconds later, The Guardian reported.

According to NYT, in a sign of the alarm caused by the crash, India's aviation regulators ordered Air India on Friday to carry out "additional maintenance actions" on its Boeing 787 fleet. The aviation minister said there were 34 such planes in India, eight of which had already undergone the new inspections. He said the rest would be inspected "with immediate urgency."

It could be months before a definitive explanation emerges, but videos of the accident and other evidence have begun to offer clues about what might have brought down the plane. 

Xinhua News Agency reported that Kinjarapu on Saturday said keeping in view the utmost seriousness of the incident, another high-level committee has been formed to probe the deadly plane crash in the western state of Gujarat.

The committee, according to Kinjarapu, will be headed by the home secretary and will submit its report in three months, Xinhua reported.

Flight AI171, bound for London's Gatwick Airport, crashed moments after takeoff from Ahmedabad, in India's western state of Gujarat. There was only one survivor from the 242 onboard, and dozens of people on the ground were also killed, NYT noted.

It had 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese nationals and one Canadian, apart from two pilots and 10 cabin crew members on board, Xinhua News Agency reported Saturday.

A video of the aircraft flying low and struggling to gain altitude shows the plane going down and exploding in a massive ball of fire. Parts of the plane were scattered all around the premises, and rescuers are trying to clear the debris at the spot.

Xinhua reported that so far, it is unclear how many people on the ground were killed exactly. Local media reports put the death toll at around 274.

BBC noted that on Friday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spent around 20 minutes at the site of the plane crash. Modi also visited the location of a now-viral image that shows the tail of the crashed plane lodged in a building.