A British father was booked on the Air India flight that crashed, before changing at the last minute

Owen Jackson, 31, had not told his wife that he was no longer due to fly home from Ahmedabad on Thursday after visiting India for work.

His wife Phillipa, 30, feared she had been widowed when news broke of the plane crash, in which at least 270 people died.

But Mr Jackson, from Saffron Walden, Essex, had fortuitously changed his booking to Saturday because he was tied up with work.

“It’s a shock,” he told The Sun. “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.”

Mr Jackson was coincidentally booked onto seat 11A on his Saturday flight – the same number as Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, the sole survivor of the disaster.

‘I was just bursting into tears randomly’

Mrs Jackson, a teacher, was unaware of her husband’s fate for hours because he had not said that he had changed his flights, and he was also in meetings until two hours after the crash.

“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,” she said.

“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.”

Mr Jackson added: “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.”

All but one of the 242 passengers on board died in the crash, including 52 British nationals.

Investigators are continuing to search the crash site in the Meghaninagar district, nearly a mile from the end of the runway at Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport.

The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner headed for London Gatwick crashed into a hostel, where medical students and their families were living, 30 seconds after take-off.