Air India Boeing 787 Carrying 242 Passengers Crashes After Takeoff (msn.com)
- Reference: 0178018277
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/12/1224214/air-india-boeing-787-carrying-242-passengers-crashes-after-takeoff
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/air-india-boeing-787-headed-to-london-crashes-after-takeoff/ar-AA1GzlMP
> Flight AI171 was carrying 242 passengers and crew. Video footage shared on social media showed a giant plume of smoke engulfing the crash site, with no reports of survivors.
>
> The aircraft entered a slow descent shortly after taking off, with its landing gear still extended before exploding into a huge fireball upon impact. The crash took place in a residential area, which could mean a higher death toll... The pilots in command issued a mayday call immediately after take-off to air traffic controllers, according to India's civil aviation regulator.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/air-india-boeing-787-headed-to-london-crashes-after-takeoff/ar-AA1GzlMP
Apparently just after carrying 1 billion passenger (Score:5, Informative)
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner apparently just reached 1 billion passengers carried and apparently that airplane has a pretty good record contrarily to the models most people complain about lately.
[1]https://www.boeing.ca/news/202... [boeing.ca]
[1] https://www.boeing.ca/news/2025/boeing-787-dreamliner-fleet-eclipses-1-billion-passengers
Re: (Score:2)
There really isn't any point speculating at this stage.
At least it should be possible to recover the flight recorders quickly, and they should have caught everything related to the crash. We should know fairly quickly if it was something like debris on the runway, or an engine failure, rather than the aircraft itself.
Well, I'll baselessly speculate (Score:3, Informative)
From the video that's floating about it's clearly under control and suffering from a lack of power. My money's on bird strike or other FOD ingestion taking out both engines, second place bad fuel or engine oil starvation, third place an undocumented control mode that decided to shut down both engines for *reasons* because lol boeing
Re: Well, I'll baselessly speculate (Score:4, Insightful)
Iâ(TM)d insert into your speculation, any of the above causing only one engine to fail, and then the pilots shut down the wrong engine.
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe they triggered the fire supression on both engines rendering both useless and impossible to restart.
Re: (Score:2)
Zeroth place: flaps retracted instead of landing gear since the video shows flaps up and gear down, a combination that would be incredibly unlikely at this point after takeoff. With flaps retracted you would need a LOT more thrust to compensate the lack of lift.
Re: (Score:2)
There are some videos online with sound.
Do we hear the engines?
Hopefully an airplane enthusiast who is familiar with the expected sound profile can comment.
Everyone OK? (Score:3)
I mean, like the shareholders. Are all Boeing's shareholders OK? Obviously the passengers/crew and some people on the ground are dead, but won't someone think of the shareholders?!?
Re: (Score:1)
With a Ouija board?
Re: (Score:1)
Why do you hate shareholders?
Re: Everyone OK? (Score:2)
You make me love the Internet again.
Re: (Score:1)
Hackers got a virus to fit on a floppy disk?
A bit of research tells me the Boeing 787 was announced in 2003. That was still when floppy disks would have been used for data transfer, as I can recall it being a big deal that the iMac in 1999 was kind of a big deal for not having a floppy drive, which made USB floppy drives a popular peripheral for computers for years after.
Plenty of aircraft have some kind of MCAS but the Boeing 737 MAX made MCAS infamous for causing crashes than preventing them. The Boeing
Re: (Score:2)
The 737 MAX issues with the MCAS were caused by farming the project out to the lowest bidder, a company who normally wrote software for the financial industry and had no history dealing with real-time inputs, life-safety hardware, or even handling inputs from multiple devices simultaneously. Their idea of having a failover computer was literally:
1) Disable malfunctioning MCAS (using a switch that Boeing didn't document)
2) Land the plane
3) Enable the backup MCAS
4) Take off again
Re: (Score:2)
One minor correction: The 787 family was announced in 2003, but the first commercial model of the family -- 787-8, much like this one -- went into operations in 2011, some time later.
Re: (Score:2)
> Maybe hackers caused the flight control computer to shut down the engines.
Maybe aliens used their alien technology to drive the plane into the ground.
Maybe it was motherfuckin snakes on the motherfuckin plane.
Maybe the pilots were off having tea and not paying attention.
Maybe Trump had the plane shot.
Maybe OBAMA did.
Maybe it was a dual-engine elephant ingestion.
Maybe Boeing forgot to install steering yokes on this plane, and nobody noticed till they took off.
> Results from the CVR and CDR need to be made public and fast.
Why? It's much more fun to throw around wild asinine speculations when we have basically zero information. Also, it'
retracting flaps instead of landing gear (Score:1)
A former Romanian pilot was speculating that this might be human error. As in they might have retracted the flaps instead of the landing gear. Link to the article in Romanian: [1]https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/ex... [digi24.ro]
[1] https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/externe/ce-spune-un-fost-pilot-roman-care-a-zburat-chiar-pe-tipul-de-avion-ce-s-a-prabusit-in-india-despre-tragedia-aviatica-de-la-ahmedabad-3281813
Re: (Score:3)
That is possible, but it still looks like they had no engine power. Wouldn't have made a big difference.
Re: (Score:2)
Where do you get this "looks like" from? Retracting the flaps would cause the plane to stall, from the ground at takeoff this would look very similar to not having enough thrust. On the flip side we know what a plane looks like with its flaps down and up, and in the videos seen the flaps are definitely up, ... while the plane is insanely close to the ground.
Lots we don't know yet. Maybe this speculation has nothing to do with it. But I'm curious as to the source of the engine power claim.
Re: retracting flaps instead of landing gear (Score:2)
The commentary on r/aviation is good on the flaps up/down point, in so far as we canâ(TM)t really tell from the videos we currently have: [1]https://old.reddit.com/r/aviat... [reddit.com]
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1l9hqzp/air_india_flight_171_crash/mxco7wd/
Re: (Score:2)
Does match what I see on the video from the rear. The video so far is classic retraction of the flaps to early in high hot conditions with poor stick and rudder skills, all they had to do is overcome the fly by wire mode of thought, push the nose down, and climb rate along with less drag would have had them at 1400 fpm skywards. Investigators will first look at weight and balance might have been entered incorrectly giving the pilots the wrong V2 speed, but that should have been picked up by internationa
Re: (Score:2)
> Every American engineer that has worked with a bad engineer from India knows what happened here.
Yeah, some racist fuckwit made a generalisation about a case that impacted an airline with up until today had a perfect safety record. That's what happened here.
Why keep calling out Boeing? (Score:2)
Why do we always see these messages calling out Boeing, as though they had a hand in the crash?
For news reports for a car crash we don't commonly see things like Ford Bronco plows into crowd of people as if the Bronco or Ford had any involvement in the driver's actions...
If it comes out that it was an issue with the plane, and it's not a maintenance issue and really is a product flaw, then yeah, let's blame the manufacturer all day long.
Until then, all this does is associate a really horrible accident to a
Re: (Score:2)
Because until further information is known we can only go with what we do know. We absolutely do call out Ford if the wheel falls off. Driving into a crowd is something that needs to be manually done, falling out of the sky can have a million causes - which for a significantly portion of history has been directly linked to the vendor of the plane in some way.
If Ford trained the driver who ploughed into the crowd we'd call that out too.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that's fair, if Boeing hadn't had a recent history failures with the 737 MAX. In your analogy it'd be like if Ford Expeditions had a history of brake failures and caused multiple accidents 3 years ago, and now a Ford Bronco plows into a crowd. Chances are it's just a maniac in a car, but who knows it could be the Ford!
However I'm going to go on a limb and say this one is likely nothing to do with Boeing, as we've not heard of problems with the 787. People just love to jump on a hate bandwagon given
Flaps ups, landing gear down (Score:3)
On the forum where aviation professional gather: [1]https://www.pprune.org/acciden... [pprune.org]
it stood out that the landing gear should have been up, and the flaps should have been set.
However, the landing gear was still down while the flaps were retracted.
Almost as if the pilots mixed up these two operations.
With flaps 0, at that speed, the plane could sadly not get enough lift.
[1] https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-crash-near-ahmedabad-2.html
Re: Flaps ups, landing gear down (Score:2)
Landing gear up could be explained by engine troubles preoccupied but flaps up as noted out of place. If so expect news and specialists to elaborate soon. Affected families probably anxious for answers at least some of them as the mourn their losses.
Re: Flaps ups, landing gear down (Score:3)
From commentary on Reddit (including former 787 pilots), the audio seems to indicate that the RAT was deployed, which would indicate a full power failure. If that happened before the gear was retracted, it would have left it in place. Also, the video quality and flap design make it difficult to tell whether flaps were deployed or not.
[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/aviat... [reddit.com]
And
[2]https://old.reddit.com/r/aviat... [reddit.com]
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1l9hqzp/air_india_flight_171_crash/mxcn99k/?sort=top
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1l9hqzp/air_india_flight_171_crash/mxco7wd/
It seems (Score:2)
Fortunately, it doesn't appear to be a Pakistani terrorist act.
Re:It seems (Score:4)
Absolutely nobody knows the cause yet, and it likely won't be fully determined for months. Saying it is or is not anything at this stage is idiotic.
Re: It seems (Score:5, Informative)
Well, we do know some things. We know that it had a loud bang and compressor stall roughly at V1. We know the pilots issued a mayday as they left the ground. We know that it descended in a controlled manner with no engine noise into terrain with the RAT deployed.
While we donâ(TM)t *know*, it looks very much like it suffered a dual engine out situation. Iâ(TM)d bet itâ(TM)s one of:
1. Engine no 1 failed, pilots shut down engine to stop vibrations and/or fire⦠only they shut down engine no 2. Once you deploy the engine fire handle, thereâ(TM)s no restarting the engine, and youâ(TM)re screwed.
2. Plane suffered dual engine failure (most likely due to external factors like birds, because the GE GenX engines have so far been bulletproof).
Re: (Score:3)
> We know that it had a loud bang and compressor stall roughly at V1. We know the pilots issued a mayday ...
Where does this knowledge come from? I'd expect pprune to mention these things, but there's no mention of Compressor Stall there. There IS, however a user called Compresser_Stall who has commented in the thread. All the broken character encoding suggests that it's been copied and pasted from elsewhere. From an AI, perhaps?
Re: It seems (Score:5, Interesting)
The broken character encoding is because slashdot is the one website that has existed for multiple decades and still canâ(TM)t correctly handle utf-8 in its text inputs. A common reason for seeing broken characters is using Apple devices which will by default use more interesting characters than just ASCII.
The information about the compressor stall comes from eye witnesses who both saw and heard the engine banging, and ejecting big flashes of flame out the back around V1.
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Knowing India and Indian workers most likely someone skimped on maintenance, [1]installed crappy fake Chinese Ripoff Parts [nytimes.com] and pocketed the extra cash, or did other faulty work and then covered it up on the record sheets. [2]It's happened before. [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/us/politics/boeing-airbus-titanium-faa.html
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyGapDmHMpc
Re: (Score:2)
> Knowing India and Indian workers most likely someone skimped on maintenance, [1]installed crappy fake Chinese Ripoff Parts [nytimes.com]
From the context a reasonable person may believe that your paywalled link would show that Indian workers are installing Chinese rip-off parts. The paywall can be bypassed by [2]http://archive.is/https://www.... [archive.is] and says genuine parts may have been made by fake titanium, although no faulty parts have been found.
> and pocketed the extra cash, or did other faulty work and then covered it up on the record sheets. [3]It's happened before. [youtube.com]
I'm just not going to watch a 45 minute video. Feel free to quote from the transcript if there are any relevant parts. From the title of the video it seems to concern [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] a
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/us/politics/boeing-airbus-titanium-faa.html
[2] http://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/us/politics/boeing-airbus-titanium-faa.html
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyGapDmHMpc
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria_Airways_Flight_2120
Re: (Score:2)
There is video footage online showing the plane taking off without its flaps down. It's very likely the direct cause of the event. The root cause is up to speculation, but terrorism is insanely unlikely.
Re: It seems (Score:2)
Whether or not the flaps were down may not be so cut and dry: [1]https://old.reddit.com/r/aviat... [reddit.com]
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1l9hqzp/air_india_flight_171_crash/mxco7wd/
Re: (Score:1)
Why is that fortunate?