A Boeing Dreamliner carrying 242 people crashed shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad in western India, local authorities and the airline said Thursday.
It is being reported that one passenger, a British national seated in 11A, has survived the crash.
Air India Flight 171 was en route to London’s Gatwick Airport when the accident occurred. FlightRadar data posted on X shows the aircraft reached a maximum altitude of 625 feet before descending at a vertical speed of 475 feet per minute.
In a statement on X, Air India confirmed: “Flight AI171, operating from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick, was involved in an accident shortly after takeoff today.” The airline said the Boeing 787-8, which departed at 13:38, was carrying 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, one Canadian and seven Portuguese nationals.
Thursday’s crash is the first involving a Boeing 787 Dreamliner since the aircraft entered service in 2011, according to Boeing’s accident data. Boeing said it is in contact with Air India and added on X: “Our thoughts are with the passengers, crew, first responders, and all affected.”
In an AP report, aviation safety consultant John M. Cox said investigators are likely to examine whether the Air India plane was properly configured for flight. While emphasizing that it’s too early to draw conclusions, Cox pointed to grainy video of the flight that may prompt investigators to look into whether the slats and flaps were correctly positioned during the aircraft’s climb.
“The image shows the airplane’s nose pitching up while it continues to descend,” he said. “That suggests the plane wasn’t generating enough lift.”
MSN?
Sure looks like a loss of power to me although I don’t make out any flaps hanging down ??
I don’t see any flaps in this video, either?
“a British nationalist” Unless you’re intending to make some sort of political statement about this particular individual, I’m assuming you meant “a British national”.
How patriotic is he?
Well crud. From now on I’ll have to fight to get seat 11A when traveling.
So I watched two videos. One as the plane was on the takeoff roll, and lifting off, and the other from close to where it crashed. Here’s what I noticed. No flaps. flaps were stowed on the take off run. Second, the gear was never retracted. Third the attitude was constantly pitched up, the nose was never lowered, and it looked like the plane just settled gently down until it hit the ground. There would have been take off warning, configuration messages, all kinds of warnings going on in the cockpit. It’s a sad situation but I doubt engines were the problem. It appears to me that the configuration just prevented the plane from flying. But: why didn’t they retract the gear? why didn’t they abort the takeoff? I"m not a 787 expert, but I know Boeing aircraft very well. I have followed the 787 through design and introduction, including receiving the Boeing videos showing the systems, design etc. I have no business being and armchair quarterback, but I can see things from the videos that are really disturbing.
Only on 787’s thought Arthur!
During a trip to Santo Domingo in a Lear 60, we were dropping our pax off at the GA apron which is immediately next to the air carrier terminal. F/O and I watched a TUI 787 push back from a nearby gate then proceed to taxi past us. Those things are eerily quiet on the ground!
There seems to be engine noise initially but towards the end didn’t seem to be. No flaps visible and gear still down could that be a system failure ?
The pilot told the copilot to raise the gear but the co-pilot mistakenly put the flaps up and then the plane went down.
A seriously mindboggling accident. Not sure about you guys, but seeing a 787 Dreamliner crash is heartbreaking. To me this looks odd. Gear down, flaps up (Config Alerts All Over The Place) and I still think that both Engines must have failed to make this happen.
On the airport footage of the takeoff, there appears to be a lot of dust raised at liftoff. Is this normal at this airport? Or was this an extended takeoff roll lifting off very near the end of the paved surface? Would 5 degrees of flaps be easily observable on either video? In general, I think incorrect inputs resulting in incorrect configuration would be more likely than ignoring TCOWS warnings.
One report I read said the pilot declared a mayday and stated loss of power/thrust. The 787 data recorder records a lot of parameters. Data should point to the probem(s) pretty easily.
I vaguely recall an Airbus incident quite a while back. Some sort of demonstration flight. Crew was doing a low pass down the runway, a/c was not configured correctly, would not throttle up the engines when commanded and it descended into trees.
It does look just like the engines were suddenly throttled back, loss of power. And I read in another publication, a person who said he is an Air India pilot and has flown that aircraft recently, say it has numerous write up in the logs that have gone unanswered. 5 degrees of flaps if that’s what is used, would be hard to detect with these grainy videos. If the boxes are recovered ok, should be an easy one to answer.
The dust came off the overrun at the end of the runway. One video I watched (CW Lemoine) said they did an intersection takeoff with only 6300 ft of runway. High density altitude too. The FDR and CVR should tell us a lot.
Way to go, AJ Foyt. The first crash of highly advanced aircraft takes 292 people to their death, and you’re making some stupid ass childish joke about picking your seat on a future flight.
It’s classy. Really classy, and this isn’t the first time you said something like this.Have you ever felt shame over saying something offensive?
I think I can say definitely that the flaps were up on the takeoff roll. Just looked at the video of the take off run again. If things had gone so wrong, why wasn’t the gear raised? There was nowhere to land at that point. On the airbus demo, yes, it was a configuration issue that didn’t allow the fly by wire system to pick the nose up, also. Automation is not always perfect, however, I don’t know of a plane designed yet, that can’t be manually overrode to give you things like max power, and pitch change. The basics, power pitch and airspeed still apply. However, to do all this, you need to disengage the flight guidance systems. Once again though, my concern is that when taking off, there would have been many warnings in the cockpit, as soon as the power was increased. When we got our first new sophisticated aircraft, A 1988 GIV, I noticed a lot of things that made flying so much more easy in some cases, but distracted the pilots from the normal flying actions: for example, they were spending a lot of time on go arounds, looking at the FMS, rather than someone looking out the window. The autothrottles were not yet certified, and we were doing crew training just after the outfitting was complete. There was a lot of learning going on, for all of us.
The 787 has been around a long time now, and has been a good performer, despite the design issues that should never have happened. I just wonder what could have happened on this particular trip. It would have seemed so normal and routine. A no flap take off would not have been feasible with the fuel load and weights they would have had on this trip. I also don’t know if the 787 flight guidance system will allow a no flap takeoff on this plane.
He tries to be a race car driver - too fast off the mark gets one disqualified. :-o)
OMG … gear down, flaps maybe retracted instead AND an intersection takeoff !!
If I were a chief pilot of some organization, I’d write it into the ops manual … NO INTERSECTION TAKEOFFs.
Sad.
(Don’t need talking head politicians s like Secretary-General of the UN and POTUS Donald Trump. (Who should ensure funds and leadership for NTSB, which will assist India with investigation of this accident.)
Air India crash: One survivor reported; 241 killed | AP News
RIP. I’m glad that I’m not the only one who saw no flaps on the roll to the finish. The video on Twitter/X uploaded by Vikas Makwana is the clearest view of this. Though whether the aircraft w/242 on board along with fuel for a ~9 hr flight no flaps & gear down = crash, I couldn’t say.
I echo your sentiment Chuck Kubin.
Pilot’s Mayday said, “… losing power.”
MSN?
Right on! No flaps. Unless those pilots got their primary training in an airliner, where you can’t see the flaps, I think their first pre-takeoff checklist went something like, “extend flaps to full, visually check symmetry, retract flaps to T.O. position, visually check symmetry.” Taking supposition to the next level, I suspect sabotage, possibly hacking.
To those of you who here in the AvWeb comment section have been the most blatant of arm chair NTSB investigator wannabees, thank you for doing the rest of us the favor of distinguishing yourselves as being the true amateurs among us. You know who you are.
I assume you are talking about my posts: Sorry if I came across as that, even though I stated that I didn’t want to be an armchair quarterback. What I pointed out was that the flaps were stowed completely. Doesn’t take much of an expert to figure out that was a huge contributor. I did not try to make a supposition of what caused the accident. I merely pointed out my observations and the fact that an aircraft out of configuration would have had a host of messages/warnings prior to take off and when the throttles were pushed up for takeoff, or auto throttles engaged. I don’t know how the 787 autothrottles are set up. Most aircraft, won’t let you engage auto throttles until the power levers are pushed up to a certain position. This is to prevent thrust offset, but powering up one engine more than the other to turn onto the runway or go around a corner. If a plane won’t climb, you have to check power pitch and airspeed, which should have involved retracting the landing gear to reduce drag, and leveling the nose off to try and gain some airspeed. I wonder if they lost thrust, or if they simply didn’t have enough power to get out of the situation they were in, due to the flap setting and airspeed? Time will tell.
In a normal airliner takeoff the nose goes to about a 15° climb angle. This Air India never came close to that except possibly in the final few seconds before hitting the ground. It still got a half-way decent climb to about 600’ before leveling off and then gradually losing altitude; why the sudden level off regardless of flap position if it didn’t also lose power? Flap setting was not a factor in my opinion.
Worst are the pontificating former airline pilots blathering - one claimed if an engine failed the airplane would not take off.
Wrong, if past decision speed (‘V1’) procedure is to continue takeoff and climb out on one engine - which proper calculation of allowable weight facilitates. (Density altitude and runway length are primary factors, overspeed takeoff procedure often used for twins - trading runway used for climb performance.)
ATC recording or Cockpit Voice Recorder?
Most likely ATC.
Integration is essential.
Noting:
But too early to pontificate, wait for readout of FDR which has been retrieved and CVR.
From video, the slats were clearly extended. On the 787 flaps 1 is an authorized takeoff configuration. At flaps one and five on the 787, there’s an appearance of no flap extension, but the slats will be clearly visible as was the case in this mishap.
It’s also a fairly common mistake during engine failure Sim training for the crew to forget to raise the landing gear, which was obvious visible in this situation.
There is no lower life form than people who go on social media for attention or compensation while speculating about accidents with little effort or information available to understand what happened.
Thanks.
In hot and high would probably use less flap deflection to get better climb performance over obstructions.
I read that FDR has been recovered.
Of course it takes time to carefully open it, inspect memory chips for condition, repair connections or transfer to a new board, …
It appears that from images of the wreckage that both flaps and slats were extended, negating the “PNF inadvertently raised the flaps instead of the gear” theory. Also, we heard from an AA crew that raised the flaps instead of the gear after setting up the same conditions of Air India and using normal thrust, the aircraft flew away. They then did it after a V1 cut, and it flew away fine again.
There should be good data, we’ll know what happened in due course.
OMG. No armchair quarterback comments from the peanut gallery for nearly 12h… What happenend?
Would depend on thrust/weight ratio and atmospheric parameters.
Elevation of airport is low, probably warm.
Aircraft presumably heavy as headed for England.
One runway of 11,500 feet length, taxiway along takeoff end where terminals are, with possible entrances to runway. A busy airport.
One claim is that crew did not use full runway for takeoff.
Hit building 2km from liftoff end of runway.
The aircraft back taxied and used the full length. The attention hogs who capitalize on tragedy and can’t even be bothered to understand ADSB limitations got that wrong too.
Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to mark where runway is and impacted building is, on an aerial photo.
Certainly lots of talk - supposed aviation expert Dunlap makes several logical and operational mistakes in What will investigators be looking for in Air India crash data? | The Seattle Times.
Was the RAT deployed? I’ve seen a couple pictures where people were speculating that it was. That would support a total loss of thrust theory.
Ditto, there’s never been a post I’ve ever seen from Authur Foyt which has been anything but an exhibit of the dregs of humanity.
I’ve qualified on four different jets and never seen anything like that on a pre-takeoff checklist for any of them. Nor on any primary trainer I’ve flown, either.
I guess I had a better instructor, a WW2 P-51 pilot who re-upped for Korea and was the maintenance check pilot for the F-51s. Margaret Ringenberg (“The Greatest Generation” - Brokaw) was a dear friend and she taught the same.