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.

Investigators in India are studying the black boxes of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner after recovering them from the aircraft wreckage to ascertain the cause of last week’s plane crash that left at least 270 people dead.

There have been cases of a very small number of survivors in very serious accidents, but it is "very rare" for there to be only one, a professor told Newsweek.