A BRITISH dad has told of his shock after he was originally due to fly home on the doomed Air India flight – but changed his plans.
Owen Jackson, 31, from Saffron Walden in Essex, had been on a work trip to India and scheduled to jet back on Thursday.
SuppliedOwen Jackson, with wife Phillipa, had been on a work trip in India when he decided to take a different flight home[/caption]
Businessman Owen, who was in the country for the first time to help train colleagues in a call centre, had to decide between flying back on Thursday or Saturday.
In the end his colleagues said to take the Saturday flight as the job would take a bit longer than originally planned.
He was then booked onto the same route on Saturday which would have been the same aircraft as the one which crashed, killing all but one of the 242 people onboard.
In a bizarre coincidence, Owen was booked onto seat 11A for the Saturday flight.
It is the same seat number as the sole survivor of the devastating crash, Vishwashkumar Ramesh.
Owen told The Sun: “It’s a shock. I’m more grateful than anything else – it is such a weird coincidence.
“You hear it every now and again about planes going down and you don’t really think much of it, but when it’s the actual aircraft you’re potentially getting on two days later, it does make you think.
“My main emotion on the whole thing is I’m quite grateful for the fact that I made that decision when I did.”
When news first broke of the crash, Owen had not told his family back home which day he was due to fly back on.
Wife Phillipa, 30, spent two hours unsure whether her husband had perished in the crash, as he had not informed her he had changed his plans.
Owen said: “I hadn’t checked my phone two hours after it happened, after the news broke. I probably was one of the last people to find out about it, funnily enough, because I was in meetings exactly when the news was breaking.”
Phillipa said: “It was surreal. It was like being in a dream, but not actually just hoping to wake up, but pinching yourself over and over again and not waking up.
“I work with children, so I was kind of teaching at the time and just trying to not let them see or know what I was feeling.
“I still feel affected by it now, to be honest with you, for days. I was just bursting into tears randomly.
“The way we felt is nothing compared to how the victims and their families are actually feeling, my heart really goes out to them, it’s just awful.”
The plane seconds before disaster with its landing gear still extendedx/nchorAnandN
It then crashed in a fireball at a doctor’s hostelx/nchorAnandN
EPAFirefighters work at the site of the crash near Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad[/caption]
EPAPeople stand near debris at the crash site[/caption]
EPACrews search and clear the wreck[/caption] Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
