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Air India Boeing 787 Carrying 242 Passengers Crashes After Takeoff (msn.com) 141

Posted by EditorDavid from the sad-news dept.
Flying to London, a Boeing 787 aircraft operated by Air India "crashed shortly after taking off..." reports Bloomberg, "in what stands to be the worst accident involving the U.S. planemaker's most advanced widebody airliner." 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. [UPDATE: Reuters reports one passenger jumped out of the emergency exit and survived, with a senior police officer saying "chances are that there might be more survivors among the injured who are being treated in the hospital."]

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.

Air India Boeing 787 Carrying 242 Passengers Crashes After Takeoff More | Reply

Air India Boeing 787 Carrying 242 Passengers Crashes After Takeoff

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  • Apparently just after carrying 1 billion passenger (Score:5, Informative)

    by ls671 ( 1122017 ) on Thursday June 12, 2025 @09:02AM (#65444483) Homepage

    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.
    https://www.boeing.ca/news/202... [boeing.ca]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      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.
      https://www.boeing.ca/news/202... [boeing.ca]

      At this point it's important to note that almost every 787 Squeezeliner flying is configured in high density configuration... so they only achieved this by cramming more people on.

  • 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)

      by beelsebob ( 529313 ) on Thursday June 12, 2025 @09:38AM (#65444571)

      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)

      by ltcdata ( 626981 )

      Maybe they triggered the fire supression on both engines rendering both useless and impossible to restart.

    • 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.

      • 787 has rather small flaps that are not as visible as those of older aircraft.

        • There's plenty of actual pilots agreeing that the 787's flaps don't appear down too. Their comments weigh in more heavily than yours or my (admittedly ignorant) eyes. That and the landing gear is down, which it ordinarily wouldn't be at that point in the flight. Pretty much everyone on aviation forums are agreeing that something is wrong with the plane config for it's current position.

          • Others say that they are down. And if the aircraft's had no AC power due to dual engine failure, then the landing gear could not be retracted anyway.

          • lol.

            You can't tell.
            Watch the video, with sound on.

            There simply isn't enough detail to tell if the flaps are set or not.
            There is one thing you can infer, though.
            At that low of a velocity so short after takeoff, without flaps- the plane doesn't fly at all. It's ballistic.
            That plane is not ballistic.

            Now, on to the sound.
            Listen real closely. Note what you hear and what you do not.
            In case you struggle with this part, I'll tell you.
            What you hear is the RAT. What you do not are the turbofans.
      • Thrust can never (immediately) compensate for lack of lift, at least in an airliner attempting to maintain near horizontal flight. For a given flight angle or rate of climb/descent, thrust would be needed to increase airspeed to above the clean stall speed, and it is that airspeed that would then allow the lift to maintain flight path. During the transition to clean configuration, a mild bunt of less than 1G might be necessary to avoid stall, altitude permitting. In the case of the accident aircraft, it app

    • 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.

      • We do not. Also don't see heat signature from them.
        What is distinctly audible is the RAT. It's loud as fuck and sounds like a prop engine.
        That bird had no power.

  • Everyone OK? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by andyring ( 100627 )

    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?!?

  • 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: https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/ex... [digi24.ro]

    • Re:retracting flaps instead of landing gear (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Thursday June 12, 2025 @10:16AM (#65444675)
      That is possible, but it still looks like they had no engine power. Wouldn't have made a big difference.

      • 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.

        • 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: https://old.reddit.com/r/aviat... [reddit.com]

        • 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

        • A stall looks very differently, though. The aircraft seemed to be simply losing energy and gliding to the ground, keeping wings level, which is very unlikely in a stall because one wing will almost always stall first and droop. If both wings stall simultaneously, the aircraft will fall like a stone, not glide. This is one of the reasons people are speculating about a dual engines failure. The video of that 747 crash at the Bagram airfield is an excellent example of how a stall looks like from the ground.

          • Bingo. That plane is not stalled.
            That is not a ballistic descent.
            That plane has no power, which is why it sounds like a prop engine as it flies by in the video.
            Turbofans don't sound like prop engines. Emergency ram-air turbines do.

  • 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

    • 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.

    • 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

    • Probably because there were a couple of Boeing crashes 2018/19 that saw a worldwide grounding of the 737 MAX 8 for 20 months because it was in fact a problem with the planes.

      So it'd be more like a Lexus plowing into a crowd a people and people speculating Toyota might have bad pedals and floor mats again.

      It's extremely unlikely this will be a problem with the plane itself, 787s have been flying for a while now.

  • Flaps ups, landing gear down (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SciCom Luke ( 2739317 ) on Thursday June 12, 2025 @10:19AM (#65444689)
    On the forum where aviation professional gather: 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.

  • Seat 11A (Score:3)

    by blastard ( 816262 ) on Thursday June 12, 2025 @01:12PM (#65445143)

    Apparently there was a sole survivor of this crash.
    Vishwashkumar Ramesh was seated in 11A. He was filmed walking to an ambulance. His brother was also on the flight but not accounted for just yet

    He also had his boarding pass with him.

    • That's amazing.

      I just went in and added that detail to the story... Apparently as the plane was coming down, he jumped out of the emergency exit.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Apparently as the plane was coming down, he jumped out of the emergency exit.

        That sounds very far-fetched. First, these things are not easy to get open. Second, he would have been traveling at plane speed and crashed into houses. There is not "walking to the ambulance" after. What is credible, is that he got out the emergency exit _after_ the plane crashed.

  • "AI". Was bound to crash at some point. ;-)

  • If I was him I would buy a lottery ticket. What are the odds of this happening. :-)
  • Yet again someone gets to hear Boeing..Boeing...Boeing...Boeing...Boeing as plane parts bounce on the ground.

  • Probably terrorist Turkeys hand in crash

    Reuters reported on Friday that Air India was lobbying Indian officials to disallow rival IndiGo's (INGL.NS), opens new tab leasing tie-up with Turkish Airlines (THYAO.IS), opens new tab, citing business impact as well as security concerns sparked by Ankara's support for Pakistan.

    Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan expressed public solidarity with Pakistan, another majority-Muslim country, after India conducted military strikes in response to an attack in Indian

  • > "chances are that there might be more survivors among the injured who are being treated in the hospital Or just a sarcastic jab at the quality of Indian hospitals?
    • Not necessarily. Since most of the injuries are apparently due to burns it is not unreasonable to think that a large percentage of those taken to hospital will not survive even in a very good hospital. I don't think it need be taken as about the quality of Indian hospitals.

    • https://www.perplexity.ai/sear... [perplexity.ai]

      why do so many americans go to india for meducal treatment deep research, incl Ayurveda, Yoga

      Many Americans travel to India for medical treatment due to several key factors:

      - **Cost-Effectiveness and Quality**: Medical procedures in India are significantly more affordable compared to the US, while still offering high-quality care and advanced technology in internationally accredited hospitals staffed by well-trained doctors[5].
      - **Shorter Wait Times**: Patients often experie

  • The survivor mentioned reaching for a belt under his seat, before jumping out...or something.

    What is this belt he's talking about?

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