Air India goes to families with personal belongings from Mangalore wreckage

New Delhi: A couple of rosaries, toys, clothes for a newborn, handwritten letters to dear ones, family photographs—these are just few of the personal belongings retrieved from the wreckage of the Air India Express crash site last year. Now the airline is trying to find their owners.
“For the first time in the country, we made a special effort to return each and every unassociated item to respective families. A US-based disaster management specialist firm, Kenyon International, was hired to prepare a catalogue of all these items recovered from the crash site in Mangalore,” said Air India’s Quality Management Systems (QMS) head Harpreet A De Singh.
The national carrier began couriering a catalogue of these items to the families for identification. The crash killed 158 people, including cabin crew onboard the Dubai-Mangalore flight in May last year, leaving eight survivors.
The task was by no means easy, said Singh. It included cleaning all the items of any traces of human remains or burns, disinfecting them and restoring them, as much as possible, to their original state.
After the sanitisation process, it took another two months to prepare the catalogue. It was mailed to over 100 addresses in India and abroad, displaying 330 items along with a unique identification code. The items were divided into various heads such as electronics, jewellery and textiles. Once the deceased’s family or survivor revert with list of items identified, Air India officials, especially deputed for the task, will hand over the belongings following verification, said Singh.
13/02/11 Smita Aggarwal/Indian Express

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Categories: Air India Budget Feb 2011, Air India Feb 2011, Safety Feb 2011