Terrible air crash in India with enormous loss of life
An Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner blew up on impact as it stalled off the departure end of a runway in Ahmedabad. The plane slammed into a doctor’s office, presumably killing all 242 passengers aboard and the crew. Casualties on the ground will likely end up ballooning as well.
More here; it is the worst aviation disaster in a decade, in terms of loss of life:
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, with 242 people on board, which was headed for Gatwick Airport, south of the British capital, had only one survivor after it crashed onto a medical college hostel during lunch hour. …
The sole survivor is a British national of Indian origin and is being treated in a hospital, the airline confirmed. The man told Indian media how he had heard a loud noise shortly after Flight AI171 took off.
“We are still verifying the number of dead, including those killed in the building where the plane crashed,” Vidhi Chaudhary, a top state police officer, told Reuters. …The only known surviving passenger was in seat 11A, next to an emergency exit, Chaudhary said, adding that there could be more survivors in hospital.
“Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed,” 40-year-old Ramesh Viswashkumar told the Hindustan Times, which showed a boarding pass for seat 11A in that name online.
“It all happened so quickly,” he told the paper from his hospital bed.
It is not so very unusual for catastrophic plane crashes to have sole survivors; see this.
RIP to all the dead. A terrible tragedy.
“a loud noise”. That’s going to get a lot of attention.
Boeing’s earlier experiences with what might have been called “automatic crash on takeoff” didn’t make a loud noise, as far as I can recall reporting.
This would be something else than internal systems screw up. If an engine flames out due to interrupted air flow, does it make a noise? Supposedly happened to ArrowAir 1285. No noise.
Deliberate action by pilot, happened a couple of times, wouldn’t make a “loud noise”.
A lot of mystery here. The 787 had a perfect record until now. The video adds to the mystery. From first glance the behavior is that of an extremely unlikely simultaneous dual engine loss. There’s question as to whether the flaps were deployed which would have been catastrophic with a fully loaded plane at such high density altitude. But there would have been loud aural and visual warnings in the cockpit if that was the case as the throttles were advanced.
Black boxes have been recovered so more actual facts should be forthcoming.
Perhaps accident. Perhaps design flaw. Perhaps incompetent maintenance. Perhaps terrorism. Given all that has gone before,
whatever the official report, upon what basis might we trust it? Once exposed, lies by officials act as an acid upon the societal sinews that hold together the body politic.
Something mystifying—a VR V1 V2 issue—if true…and guaranteeing a failure to achieve altitude.
The pilots on this site will likely be able to explain…
‘“No Thrust”: Over 260 Dead And One Survivor After Air India Crash’—
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/air-india-boeing-787-8-dreamliner-bound-uk-crashes
Quoted tweets (towards the bottom of the article):
#1.
#2.
Bonchie, at Red State, is, I believe, a commercial airline pilot. He’s been right on several recent crashes. He says:
https://x.com/bonchieredstate/status/1933186463752954196
Also (from another tweet included in the same article I linked to above):
#3.
If the above observations are pertinent, two questions (among no doubt many others) would seem to be:
– what caused the plane to use only half the available runway before going airborne?
– why were the flaps not set correctly?
The half runway speculation has been falsified by flightradar24. That runway requires a plane to enter the runway at the half way point and then back taxi to the full length as there is no parallel taxiway for the entire runway. It didn’t takeoff from the half way point.
The roughly similar crash I remember is the Northwest Airlines one in 1987 with a sole survivor. A 4 year old girl named, Cecelia Cichan. The rescue people were very shaken by dealing with all the burned body parts, but one said that little Cecelia was folded up between a seat bottom cushion and a seat back cushion.
The loud bang sounds like it is likely to be connected to the cause, However, if not…
The Northwest crash was caused by a failure to deploy the flaps. The pre-takeoff taxiing was rather complicated and distracting, but not horribly so. The big screw-up was a habit of many pilots or copilots of pulling a circuit breaker to switch off an annoying cockpit alarm. That particular alarm, wasn’t relevant to the crash (or maybe it was?), but they also inadvertently disabled the flaps alarm which probably would have prevented the crash.
Video shot by one of the passengers of the doomed plane, which has just shown up, has him saying that nothing works–the AC is out, and he’s pushing on the touch screen in front of him but nothing is working.
I don’t fly airplanes. But the a/c had gotten some altitude. Was it out of ground effect? The contribution of ground effect depends on the plane’s distance above ground and the plane’s speed. Being heavier doesn’t help. Still, there he was. What would have happened if he’d dropped the nose with the throttles at max? He’d gain speed, which means air over wings, stop climbing which steals energy, get back into ground effect. Was his kinetic energy downward sufficient to overcome those factors before they became useful?
There was a flap-free crash at Detroit Metro decades ago. How, if you’re in the cockpit, do you know if the flaps are deployed and is there a warning if not?
I watched the video. Not conclusive, but the airplane lost lift (stall), or thrust (engine power), or both. The loud explosive noise might have been a compressor stall. Compressor stalls occur when the airflow into the engine is irregular. (Not laminar) A high angle of attack can cause that.
The view from the rear isn’t definitive, but it appears the aircraft hits a pretty high angle of attack (stall angle?) and then begins settling toward the ground. The black boxes will tell the story. No sense speculating about the why until the black boxes are recovered and read.
I remember the Northwest crash because at the time I was with my wife in Minneapolis visiting my sister and we were about to fly to Detroit on Northwest where my wife grew up, and where the crash took place. It was disconcerting to say the least, I think we had to change our flight which may have been cancelled due to the crash.
This all led me to search on the crash and I ended up at a long Wikipedia list of airline crashes with 50 or more fatalities. It was actually reassuring that so few of them have taken place in the US, most were in third world countries and Russia had a lot. It also confirmed my impression that despite the boom in air travel major crashes have become much rarer at least in the US. Scanning the list it accorded with my childhood memory that there used to be around one a year. Gradually slowing down but even in the 80s and 90s there were 6 or 7 per decade. But only four since then not counting 9/11. I didn’t really analyze for cause but there seemed to be quite a few with poor maintenance. The Detroit crash was blamed on pilot error but there may have also been an equipment malfunction.
Video shot by one of the passengers of the doomed plane,
==
Per local news reports here, the passenger was on an earlier flight of the same plane.
Amazing how all the expert aviation sleuths are coming forward to explain why the plane crashed and the actual investigation into its causes has been ongoing for only 1 or 2 days.
One would think that everybody would wait a bit and see what the investigation produces.
This one we definitely have to wait for the investigation. It clearly stalls and pancakes in indicating insufficient lift or thrust or both. I’ve seen analysis of the video that includes an odd buzzing and there is speculation that the RAT (Ram Air Turbine) deployed which is an emergency device to provide electrical power for instruments and hydraulics in the case of a dual engine failure. Dual engine failures are unusual and the surviving passengers loud bang might be an engine failure, but the video shows no obvious hints. Given it was loaded for a flight to the UK the amount of fuel it had pretty much doomed it on crash.
Way too early for any serious analysis of what happened, but a lot of people seem eager to blame Boeing, including people who should know better: WSJ headline today: “Boeing’s Recovery Now in Question”