Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india-flight-ai171-plane-crash-ahmedabad-india-latest-updates

by Gud • 1 year ago

500 543 1 year ago

theguardian.com

m4tthumphrey• 1 year ago

Seems like they lost power? https://x.com/georgiameloniii/status/1933091545248641248

hnpolicestate• 1 year ago

Did the Italian PM really say "I pray all passengers are safe" after posting that fireball?

aaldrick• 1 year ago

its a parody account

AHTERIX5000• 1 year ago

It seems to be a parody account

ihuk5• 1 year ago

There's a better, longer video on Reddit. At the beginning of the video, it sounds like the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) is deployed, which would suggest a dual engine failure.

Simon_O_Rourke3• 1 year ago

Dual engine failure with a stall right at the end as it's going in.

Guessing it's either a foreign object ingested into both engines, probably a bird strike, or fuel starvation.

lormayna2• 1 year ago

Going OT: why a parody account of Italian PM is tweeting a video about an airplane accident in India? Really weird

captn3m0• 1 year ago

The account is run from India.

gsky• 1 year ago

People always tweet trending stuff for popularity as simple as that

snickerbockers6• 1 year ago

Sometimes it's hard to tell the truth about what obviously just happened so all you can bear to do is say something unreasonably optimistic.

pjc50• 1 year ago

Because Twitter is a very weird and inauthentic place.

snickerbockers6• 1 year ago

jesus, that's terrifying. The pilot has control of the plane all the way down but nowhere to even attempt a landing. All he can do is raise the flaps, deploy the landing gear and hope for the best.

Although TBH it also seems like a failure of city planning, aren't most major airports outside of the limits of the city they're associated with because of stuff like this? I know most of them don't have anywhere safe to attempt an emergency landing immediately after leaving the runway but at least there aren't a bunch of homes and office buildings.

navigate8310• 1 year ago

This is India we are talking about. The population density and surrounding encroachment is usually why even small domestic cylinder blast could take lives of 100s.

placardloop2• 1 year ago

No, they’re not. Of the 20 largest airports in the US, all but one of them have homes and offices surrounding them. The one that doesn’t is Denver, that’s mostly only because Denver’s airport is relatively new and the development hasn’t reached it yet.

dghlsakjg4• 1 year ago

They put airports where there is room to put them. Frequently that means that they are well outside cities since finding space for a few 2 mile runways in the city is difficult.

However, there are plenty of airports in major cities and built up areas (in both developed and developing countries), and I have never heard of avoiding building in areas due to the (remote) possibility of crashes.

roncesvalles2• 1 year ago

Most major airports were established long ago (sometimes centuries ago) in land that used to be remote. Cities eventually expand into the surrounding area.

ihuk5• 1 year ago

I believe this is the first hull loss of a Boeing 787.

lvl155• 1 year ago

I will reserve my judgement but Boeing can’t catch a break.

bigyabai• 1 year ago

Sure they can, they're contracted to design America's next-generation F-47 fighter jet!

And hell, after the sexy beast they call the X-32 I can't see why you wouldn't want their designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-32

whycome5• 1 year ago

And Air Force One? Unless Qatari one gets its spot.

Symbiote6• 1 year ago

The Guardian live article has a video showing the crash:

Direct link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...

greybox2• 1 year ago

Some news outlets are indicating that there are some survivors: https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/air-india-dreamliner-cras...

Several injured passengers have been evacuated from the scene and transported to local hospitals.

Edit: The BBC is reporting local police as saying: "There appears to be no survivors" https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c8d1r3m8z92t?post=asset%3A8731...

rcruzeiro• 1 year ago

Most likely bystanders who got injured.

baq2• 1 year ago

You ain’t walking away from a fully fueled aircraft crashing unfortunately…

SkyeCA• 1 year ago

Crazier things have happened. It would not be shocking if a couple of people survived.

shivam543• 1 year ago

Isn't it possible to eject the fuel / fuel tank if crash is imminent?

basisword• 1 year ago

This guy did: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3v6drp96zo

Havoc3• 1 year ago

It hit a medical facility of some sort - student doctors etc, so maybe also be on ground injured

kaycey2022• 1 year ago

It crashed through the dorms of a medical college. The injured must be from there. Unlikely anyone on the plane survived.

Edit: Looks like 1 guy from the plane made it.

leetrout2• 1 year ago

FlightRadar24 shows them doing an intersection departure with only half the runway.

Assuming this is accurate I would think this is a terrible idea in a large, heavy aircraft (and I realize they might not have been heavy for this flight).

When I was flying I would regularly hear airliners refuse intersection departures past a few hundred feet from the end of the runway due to company SOPs.

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/vt-anb#3ac3097f

piva00• 1 year ago

ADS-B at that airport seems very inaccurate, if you look at previous departures there are a bunch of planes misplaced.

HackerLemon• 1 year ago

Baseless speculation and very unproductive comment. At least show some takeoff calculations and perhaps don't speculate with confirmed unreliable ADS-B data

joncrane• 1 year ago

they backtracked and used the full runway

calcifer• 1 year ago

Remember last year when a Boeing engineer whistleblower urged the company to ground all 787 Dreamliners?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/16/boeing-whis...

decimalenough4• 1 year ago

I'm not a fan of Boeing, but let's not start pointing fingers yet. We know literally nothing about what caused the accident yet, and the 787 Dreamliner has a stellar record: it's been flying since 2011, with over 1000 in service, and I believe this is its first ever major accident.

acd10j• 1 year ago

737 Max also had stellar records and then they started crashing one after other. Boeing has earned this reputation. Also as per information from twitter pilot did called mayday immediately after takeoff, so high chance of technical issues in aircraft.

shivasaxena• 1 year ago

Yes, I saw on news a pilot who regularly flies to this airport mention bird strikes as a potential cause given the bird problem in that area.

I'm very disappointed that in India this aspect is being ignored. It should stimulate local/state/central govt to solve the slum, urban garbage etc kind of problems.

voxleone• 1 year ago

The Telegraph has come up with another (somewhat odd) whistleblower story. For all we know so far, it could just as well be bird(s) strike(S).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/12/whistleblower-ra...

decimalenough4• 1 year ago

Flightradar24 reports that this occurred immediately after takeoff:

Initial ADS-B data from flight #AI171 shows that the aircraft reached a maximum barometric altitude of 625 feet (airport altitude is about 200 feet) and then it started to descend with an vertical speed of -475 feet per minute.

https://x.com/flightradar24/status/1933091913567285366?t=MhY...

This also means that the flight was fully fueled and it's sadly unlikely there will be any survivors. There are also casualties on the ground.

bombcar2• 1 year ago

So 425 above ground level in a plane that has a 200 ft wingspan, they barely got out of ground effect.

polishdude20• 1 year ago

There was one Survivor at least!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...

fortran772• 1 year ago

There’s a WSJ report with a free link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255817

JumpCrisscross9• 1 year ago

Gentle tip from a lifelong aviation enthusiast: wait one week before reading on causation.

Exposing yourself to first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive since the actual findings can rhyme with the false speculation closely enough that you wind up muddling the two in your mind.

snickerbockers6• 1 year ago

I hate so much how whenever something bad happens there's a huge rush to come up with theories that place the blame on some group or ideology you already hated for unrelated reasons. I've stopped paying attention to the news in part because I don't like how disingenuously giddy people get whenever there's a mass-casualty event. I don't even mind morbid curiosity about death and suffering but nobody should ever see it as a benefit to their chosen group-identity.

bell-cot• 1 year ago

Yeah.

But jumping to conclusions serves a variety of human emotional needs. And in an attention economy, that means it also serves a large industry's economic needs.

randomNumber78• 1 year ago

It speaks for itself that this gets down voted.

The game theory problem is probably that if everyone does it you have to do it too.

Like I strongly support equals chances, but if I e.g. get discriminated against for being a white heterosexual male -> it kinda forces me to vote against it

gosub1003• 1 year ago

This is why I despise Trump-bashing. Not that I think he's a particularly great person or leader, but when everything going wrong in the world gets tied back to him, I know it's ideologically driven.

mattbrewsbytes2• 1 year ago

I was just watching something the other day about how jet engines have gotten more efficient and powerful over the last 50 years where commercial airliners really only need 2 engines. All 2 engine aircraft also have to be able to operate on 1 engine as well if there is a failure.

One has to wonder if this was a bird strike incident on both engines that maybe having 4 engines would have allowed the plane to circle back around.

Ichthypresbyter2• 1 year ago

Why would a flock of birds large enough to be ingested by both engines of a two-engined plane not also be large enough to be ingested by all four engines of a four-engined plane?

defrost6• 1 year ago

A multiple engine aircraft maintaining flight on a single engine is vastly different to the same craft being able to complete a take off when an engine fails mid process.

Aircraft can land (in right circumstances) by gliding in sans power .. the same cannot be said for take offs.

ajross2• 1 year ago

I don't think there's ever been a double-bird-strike incident, though. And what dual engine failures I can think of are due to failure of a shared system (e.g. fuel exhaustion, c.f. Gimli Glider).

[Edit: yeah, yeah, forgot the Tom Hanks movie, sue me. I do wish folks would respond to the much more important point below, which isn't invalidated by a single data point though.]

Constructing solutions for multiple-mode failures like this is a bad engineering smell. Almost always the solution isn't actually helping anything, and often makes things worse in whatever metric you're looking at. In the example here, having four engines makes the chances of total thrust loss lower, but it doubles the chance of a single engine failure. And the literature is filled with incidents of theoretically-survivable single engine failures that led to hull loss as a proximate cause (generally by confusing or panicking the crew).

snickerbockers6• 1 year ago

But does that rule apply during liftoff or only when it's in-flight? Based on the map it probably never got that much altitude, as it barely traveled 2*length_of_runway, and that's including the runway itself.

moralestapia2• 1 year ago

Your comment does not deserve to be downvoted, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

fredoralive2• 1 year ago

In the 1980s a British Airways 747 flew through volcanic ash and lost all four engines. So just having more engines may not always be the solution, as in suitably unlikely circumstances you can still lose all of them.

(In that case they were at cruising altitude, so had time to handle the situation and relight the engines).

bartread4• 1 year ago

Yeah, I think I might wait for the MentourPilot take on this one. I can't see any benefit in speculating.

Horrifying that it came down in a residential area with almost all its fuel still on board though. The aftermath is beyond belief.

FridayoLeary4• 1 year ago

Yes. Unfortunately this year alone will give him quite a backlog. Every month there's been a couple of disasters or near disasters and there's no apparent connection between any of them.

apples_oranges2• 1 year ago

I know it's not his fault, hate the player not the game, but he will make what off this crash (and his analysis ofc)? $10k?

I remember long ago he said he would not report on crashes but that's what people want so no blame..

okdood64• 1 year ago

blancolirio on YT gives more timely but objective (i.e., tries to stick to the latest facts) takes on aviation incidents. There will be a fair bit of speculation still...

dylan6042• 1 year ago

9/11 showed us the damages of a plane crash with a full load of fuel can do and goes to show why dumping fuel is part of the procedures when planes are coming inf for a landing under "strained" conditions.

randomNumber78• 1 year ago

100% agreed on MentourPilot. He was the only one to not try to make money on jejuair speculation for example.

Also as an engineer you can actually learn a lot about technical and social failures.

__m2• 1 year ago

Compulsive debuggers, probably not uncommon here

tusim• 1 year ago

I've seen so many speculations from blurry video, spotty adsb data en straight up racism about this crash.

blitzar2• 1 year ago

Pro tip from a lifelong life enthusiast: if its breaking news, wait one week - first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive.

Flick through last weeks newspaper if you need reassurance.

jen729w• 1 year ago

Just read The Economist. Only comes out weekly!

ChrisGreenHeur• 1 year ago

It's also possible to just not read news altogether.

coredog64• 1 year ago

I especially liked the story last week highlighting that wet streets cause rain.

nindalf4• 1 year ago

Pro tip from an absolute rando: don’t bother with any source of breaking news. Read a weekly paper that summarises the important stuff.

If something is truly pressing, you’ll hear about it from friends or coworkers.

bgirard• 1 year ago

I agree with that wholeheartedly. The problem is that people want to discuss today's news now. Explaining them this and not being able to engage in the conversation isn't a great way to connect with people unfortunately.

crazygringo• 1 year ago

I don't know if that's meant to be a joke or serious, but I would disagree.

Most daily news is quite factual, assuming a reputable source. It doesn't require detective work the way plane crashes do.

And when it is incorrect or misleading, a week usually won't make a difference. It takes months or years or decades for the truth to come out, often in a book by a journalist or historian who frames it as a "tell-all", or a Pulitzer Prize-nominated series of newspapers articles, etc.

layer8• 1 year ago

Is there an online version of “last week’s newspaper”? More specifically, that primarily contains reporting about somewhat “matured” topics, as opposed to still developing news.

SecretDreams2• 1 year ago

There's footage after takeoff of it descending with the air ram deployed, no engine power, gears down, and flaps up.

TBD on the cause, but loss of engines for some reason seems to be the case.

I do agree that a lot of info comes out first week that isn't all right. I'm just reciting what's been shown in videos.

JumpCrisscross9• 1 year ago

I'm just reciting what's been shown in videos

Of unknown provenance, with unknown visual artefacts, et cetera. Even if completely legit, with context and thus chain of causation obscured to the point that discerning ultimate and proximate causes is impossible.

leetrout2• 1 year ago

Do you have a source for this footage or are you referring to the video everyone is recirculating?

ikekkdcjkfke• 1 year ago

Well, loss of engine power and gliding to a stop is not that a far fetched case. Why is there not a fuel dump button to prevent a whole trips worth of fuel going up in flames?

cschmatzler2• 1 year ago

Both slats and flaps were on maximum during the entire flight.

CPLX3• 1 year ago

Do you have a link to that footage? I've seen speculation on this from very blurry video but nothing like proof.

On the professional pilot forums the consensus guess is inadvertent flap retraction, instead of gear retraction, leading to inability to climb.

account424• 1 year ago

Gentle tip from a lifelong speculation enthusiast: if speculating now is fun for you don't let party poopers stop you.

jgwil22• 1 year ago

Call me a "party pooper" if you will but maybe you shouldn't be having "fun" with an accident that will have killed hundreds of people.

randomNumber78• 1 year ago

I think boing messed up the service.

They did this because they are parasites that value a few $$ over human life.

Everyone knows it after the MAX.

Everyone involved in MAX (including engineerings) should get a live in prison without pardon.

Sincerely, A fellow engineer

fortran772• 1 year ago

As I've learned from years of reading Hacker News, people who program computers are experts in _everything_!

M95D• 1 year ago

If we program computers, it doesn't mean we don't have other jobs unrelated to programming. (At least for some of us.)

traceroute66• 1 year ago

Gentle tip from a lifelong aviation enthusiast: wait one week before reading on causation.

One week ?

Wait until the damn official report comes out. That's how long you should wait.

The investigators have access to more than you or any other armchair investigator or journalist will ever do.

JumpCrisscross9• 1 year ago

Wait until the damn official report comes out. That's how long you should wait

For public discourse, one week is fine. At that point you usually have ground facts established. A common official understanding of the known knowns and unknowns is available, together with a good profile of the leading conspiracy theories that one can filter out.

dylan6042• 1 year ago

You mean like the official report that gave us the magic bullet theory?

FuriouslyAdrift• 1 year ago

There's already conspiracy theory crap on social media in India and Pakistan going around. Pretty nasty stuff already.

dingaling• 1 year ago

A week isn't long enough. Just wait for the official report.

LanceH2• 1 year ago

I mentally earmark a month and wait for something "official" or at least some expert analysis which can be confirmed. I'm not sure what the experts could discern from any video that's out there, but sometimes it's a lot.

I'm reminded of the crane collapse in Seattle that had pictures afterward and the pins were no longer in it. The expert analysis I had seen discussing it had said the pins don't just come out in a crane collapse, and where the join the sections the crane would be at its strongest. He was, of course, lit up by those with possible agendas saying "you can't speculate". He was right in the end.

So with the crane collapse it was interesting to see it all play out, but it's a matter of keeping perspective. There were literal pictures of the pins not being in place. Explanation that those pins should not be removed until later in the disassembly of the crane. Then there was the other "side" hurling accusations at him. Finally the official report.

Keeping perspective to me is that yes, I want to know what caused it. But I'm also interested along the way that some people/companies/govts seem to have a vested interest in shaping the story. So I don't run with any of it, but I try to remember who said what, even though nobody ever seems to be responsible for being batshit crazy.

gejose• 1 year ago

The source is a lot more important than the timing. Whenever Pilot Debrief or the AOPA comments on it you know it's going to be reliable.

https://www.youtube.com/@pilot-debrief/videos https://www.youtube.com/@AirSafetyInstitute/videos

Simon_O_Rourke3• 1 year ago

Counterproductive towards what end? It's not as if anyone on here is going to be invited to present before the air accident board?

platevoltage3• 1 year ago

This tip goes for pretty much any non-aviation breaking news as well.

wkat424216• 1 year ago

It depends. It also gives the spin doctors time to do their thing, remove tracks etc.

For example, when MH17 was shot down by the Russian-backed rebels, they posted celebratory posts to twitter (they thought it was a Ukrainian military transport). Also, pictures of the actual SAM battery were taken as it was rushed back to Russia in the coverup. A few hours later all that got deleted and the spin machine started. "No, there were no Russian SAMs there", "it was a Ukraine fighter jet that shot it down", etc. They even fabricated fake radar tracks. People saying it was a SAM were denounced as conspiracy theorists, stuff like that. Only a year or so later when the official investigation started finishing up, the truth was confirmed.

In that case (as the investigation later proved) the earliest information was the most accurate. This is especially the case when there are powerful interests that don't want the truth to come out. Even Boeing covered up the first 737MAX crash.

That's why I think it's not a bad idea to read all the speculation. But keeping in mind that there is no definitive answer until the official accident report comes out. Any of the speculation could be true. Or even none of it.

And really, getting it 100% accurate in my mind is not something that matters. I just read it as an aviation enthusiast (and ex-pilot). What matters is that the experts writing the report are accurate. And later admiral cloudberg who expertly translates all that into normal-people language :) Whether I have an accurate view of what exactly happened really does not matter in this world.

Also, in many cases it is already clear what happened, like that ATR recently that was in a flat spin. The part that isn't clear is how it got into that situation. But the "what happened" is also important and that is one of the things you can often read about early.

timnetworks• 1 year ago

russia is a tryharderist state

tim3335• 1 year ago

This is true. I don't entirely trust Boeing, especially since this is looking like a failure of the aircraft systems. If a thousand randos speculate one may guess the right answer.

hoti232j4324234• 1 year ago

I'm fairly sure a fraction of the "techbro" community has already decided its due to Indian programmers at Boeing, or Indian managers at AI, or some other Indian voodoo in India.

brunohaid5• 1 year ago

Baffling tragedy, again.

Clear skies, no LiveATC but reports of single Mayday call, gear out but no flaps and no control inputs visible in the grainy video. Something has to go really catastrophically wrong with a modern jetliner for that to happen, like the very dense flock of birds in Korea with the 737 a couple of months back.

The very short intersection takeoff seems like a good hint (and terrible practice), but all gears and engines look kinda OK from the outside. If they‘d scraped something on takeoff hard enough to take out both engines, there’d probably be some visible damage, or at least some gears sheared off.

EDIT:

Fully agree with the speculation in light of tragedy comments, but aviation is a bit of a special case. The reason it’s so safe is because an awful lot of people immediately start looking into potential reasons and then spend years getting to the bottom of it. The initial speculation is like an exercise: what could have happened? What if I’m in that situation, and need to act now, without knowing much of anything? If you do that a couple of dozen or hundred times throughout your life, it really builds a foundation for when an actual emergency ever happens to you.

It’s a bit like the reason most flight attendants in the emergency exit jump seat across from you won’t talk with you during the actual takeoff and landing: they‘re mentally walking through a potential emergency and what they‘d then need to do. Every single time. So if it ever happens, there‘s muscle memory, 10000x over.

EDIT 2: see the Flightradar24 comment below, it looks like they did backtrack and use the full runway.

dist-epoch• 1 year ago

A pilot speculated that it looks like a multiple bird strike.

xattt• 1 year ago

Why no control inputs then? Surely, the plane could still be commanded in absence of engine power.

greybox2• 1 year ago

What do you mean by "(and terrible practice)"?

brunohaid5• 1 year ago

„Runway behind you“ is drilled into your head as one of the useless things in aviation. You always want to make sure to use the most runway available to you, exactly for cases when something happens. Hypothetical in this case: you realize something’s wrong with the plane, but you’re already too fast and close to the end of the runway to reject the takeoff because you wouldn’t be able to stop in time anymore.

Large airports with heavy traffic sometimes have operational constraints to send a plane out ahead of another from some intersection, but if the ADSB data is correct, taking off from half the available runway in a fully loaded 787 isn’t a good idea. You just give up a ton of margin for errors.

FridayoLeary4• 1 year ago

it means using less then the full length of runaway available. I'm not a pilot but i'm guessing that it's not good because it adds an unnecessary potential complication to the take off.

Arch-TK6• 1 year ago

An intersection takeoff is a takeoff where you do not use the full length of the runway. When you are a large aeroplane with a full load, reaching the necessary takeoff speeds required to rotate (pull up and begin lifting from the ground) can take longer than normal, at which point the climb speed will also be reduced if not properly compensated for (e.g. you miscalculate something and set the wrong elevator trim/takeoff thrust/something else).

When you are taking off, you have a short portion of the runway which you can use to abort the takeoff depending on failures, but that portion can become even shorter depending on the length of the runway.

Usually the first part of takeoff you would abort for almost any reason, and the second part you would only abort in a serious emergency, once you reach a certain point you simply cannot afford to abort because you will not stop in time to crash into whatever is at the end of the runway at which point you must take-off even if you are going to immediately request an emergency landing afterwards.

So if you are heavily loaded, with a lot of people on board, and you do an intersection takeoff, you are taking a risk that if you made a mistake or something goes wrong you will not have the ability to safely recover. That's why it's a terrible practice in this case. All it does is save a little bit of time which would be spent taxiing to the actual start of the runway.

pncnmnp• 1 year ago

Regarding the intersection takeoff, Flightradar24 just tweeted this:

We are continuing to process data from receiver sources individually. Additional processing confirms #AI171 departed using the full length of Runway 23 at Ahmedabad. RWY 23 is 11,499 feet long. The aircraft backtracked to the end of the runway before beginning its take off roll.

https://x.com/flightradar24/status/1933138841214611760

james_pm• 1 year ago

FR24 is also on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lrfwaqs2ls2...

epolanski• 1 year ago

gear out

That is normal and standard procedure if you're having issues lifting the plane, because retracting the gear means _increasing_ drag for a crucial 10/15 seconds as the doors open and thus slowing the plane further.

but no flaps and no control inputs visible

Standard Dreamliner operating procedure, you take off at flaps 10 or 5, they are barely visible from the outside, see many random videos of 787s takeoffs on Youtube like this:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ld_zyEESazI

brunohaid5• 1 year ago

True on both counts, was a quite early comment and initially thought they're coming back in to land vs barely having taken off. Only leaves control inputs but given how short the video is it could also be that there simply wasn't much to input/correct anymore despite the slight rocking.

Can't edit anymore, but the general gist of catastrophic failure needed to prevent a 787 from climbing out of this situation still holds.

FireBeyond• 1 year ago

Very much so. Gear retraction should only happen if (generalizing here) you've established a "positive rate of climb".

apple4ever• 1 year ago

That is normal and standard procedure if you're having issues lifting the plane, because retracting the gear means _increasing_ drag for a crucial 10/15 seconds as the doors open and thus slowing the plane further.

Oh fascinating! I would not have considered that but it totally makes sense.

Havoc3• 1 year ago

Just fell out of the sky. Whatever went wrong clearly wasn't save-able via pilot skill

mkoryak• 1 year ago

Nyt gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/12/world/india-plane-cr...

xiphias2• 1 year ago

The Boeing Dreamliner link was marked as dupe... can you please make that the main one? This link doesn't even contain the plane type

altairprime• 1 year ago

You have to email the mods for them to make fixes like this.

throwanem5• 1 year ago

This is the first fatal crash of a 787.

babushkaboi• 1 year ago

Flight Crew

Sumeet Sabharwal – Captain - 8800+ flying hours Clive Kunder – First Officer 1 - 1100+ flying hours

Cabin Crew

Aparna Mahadik – Cabin Executive-1 Shradha Dhavan – Cabin Executive-2 Deepak Pathak Irfan Shaikh Lamnunthem Singson Maithili Patil Manisha Thapa

This was crew of AI171. Next time you're on a flight please take a moment to thank the pilots, CISF staff and cabin crew for all they do to keep us safe.

DanielleMolloy6• 1 year ago

This is the 4th within less than a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_aircraft_acc...

quantumfissure4• 1 year ago

And there were 7 in one year during 2018 and 2019.

Looking through the chart you linked, averages around 3 per year. Considering how many planes are currently in the sky at this very moment, this is a wildly useless statistic used to cause fear and panic.

Ylpertnodi• 1 year ago

Post-covid, aren't there considerably fewer planes in the skies? When i look up, the skies seem remarkably empty, compared to previously.

DanielleMolloy6• 1 year ago

Looking through the chart you linked, averages around 3 per year. this is a wildly useless statistic used to cause fear and panic.

I can read too. I added a comment with a number. You don't know my intent, this is your interpretation.

Besides, 2018/19 was a steep outlier with the 737 MAX crashes. This is why these got widespread attention and have been discussed down to the last detail for years.

arccy2• 1 year ago

We're on 4, and only halfway through the year. We're on track to exceed 7.

debarshri• 1 year ago

Is it an old or the newer aircraft?

fredoralive2• 1 year ago

The plane was 11 years old if Wikipedia is correct.

DanielleMolloy6• 1 year ago

There is a person on X who says he has left the plane before takeoff and has uploaded videos of non-functional entertainment panels: https://x.com/akku92/status/1933114664923148455

Macha• 1 year ago

I guess it’s kind of surprising in a relatively new plane, but I encounter non functional entertainment systems relatively often. They’re not treated like the safety critical systems by any airline

DanielleMolloy6• 1 year ago

I thought the same but he implies that the screens were not the only tech not working (AC, seats damaged).

It is quite an intuition to decide to leave a plane in such a moment. He just escaped death and is now aggressively attacked for saying something potentially relevant.

chromehearts2• 1 year ago

No correlation between non-functional displays on passenger seats & possible engine failures etc.

arccy2• 1 year ago

They could both point to poor maintenance by the airline

DanielleMolloy6• 1 year ago

Sure. But it could imply a lack of maintenance.

padjo• 1 year ago

I mean technically there is a correlation, it’s just very unlikely to imply causation.

rsync2• 1 year ago

"No correlation between non-functional displays on passenger seats & possible engine failures etc."

No. No no no. This is wrong, mistaken thinking.

A minimum standard of operations and attention to detail must be adhered to for high consequence / life critical endeavors and that behavior (culture?) must be enforced at all levels throughout the operation.

Ignore this heuristic at your peril - as either a consumer of these services or a provider who must demand high performance from your workforce.

Remember: flight attendants have (rarely exercised) critical health and life safety responsibilities. What messages do they internalize if this is the fourth flight in a row the coffee maker has been cracked and out of order ?

whycome5• 1 year ago

Swissair 111?

Correlation just helps lead you to common causes.

Not a cause but and indicator.

kylehotchkiss2• 1 year ago

Normal for Air India and not relevant to the accident. Tata has been trying to resolve the previous owners poor management of the airline.

smcleod• 1 year ago

Wow the 787s look so dated compared inside compared to even a320 neos!

Havoc3• 1 year ago

Who leaves a plane due to entertainment being down?

You there to watch a old movie in 720p or to go somewhere?

crossroadsguy• 1 year ago

Friends from the city told me it crashed into hostel or mess hall of a medical college.

billfruit• 1 year ago

Avherald seems overwhelmed. Any other sources for more information?

ExoticPearTree3• 1 year ago

From the videos online, it looks like the plane stalled.

dckx• 1 year ago

I'm intently following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_171

Any discussion about causes is going to be pure speculation right now. It's too early. But the Wiki article is pretty good to get an overview. Some interesting discussion on its talk page too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Air_India_Flight_171

jmkni• 1 year ago

Wikipedia is far from perfect, but in situations like this it is kind of incredible how well it can work

msravi3• 1 year ago

Apparently, there's a survivor.

https://x.com/sidhant/status/1933160167816007842

whitegladis• 1 year ago

https://imgur.com/a/ni11fhQ

chias• 1 year ago

They redact some part of the text on the ticket, but leave the scancode unredacted, which contains all of this text and more :P

markus_zhang• 1 year ago

The lottery guy. And he is unscratched!

leumon• 1 year ago

“Thirty seconds after take off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly,” said Ramesh, speaking to the Hindustan Times. He said he “impact injuries”, including bruising on his chest, eyes and feet but was otherwise lucid and conscious. https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...

storus2• 1 year ago

Seat 11A. That's interesting, typically most survivors are located in the back, this one was in the front-center.

tim3335• 1 year ago

The plane seemed to come down tail down so I guess that end would have absorbed the shock more. 11A is front left by the way.

kitd• 1 year ago

11A was next to the emergency exit. There was a comment on Reddit suggesting he actually bailed just before impact.

roncesvalles2• 1 year ago

Someone on the r/aviation thread speculated 11A would be right above the gear assembly and is hardened.

franktankbank3• 1 year ago

I call bullshit.

msravi3• 1 year ago

CCTV capture of complete takeoff: https://x.com/ShivAroor/status/1933165937399648447

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

I'm told not to speculate, but I'm going to do it anyway because this video clearly shows there was an issue going to full thrust. It's an extremely rare dual engine failure or pilots' error not calling up full thrust to keep it flying. Very possible this is the famous bird strike issue Capt. Sullenburger experienced in 2009.

msravi3• 1 year ago

But doesn't seem like a bird strike issue here, right? And given the rarity of a dual engine failure, seems to point to not calling up full thrust? But seems to me that this kind of error would be more common without any technical safeguards?

rawgabbit• 1 year ago

Extremely slow takeoff. The engines appeared to have both quit. And the plane did a slow descent and crash.

anon84873628• 1 year ago

Those slow seconds of falling must be psychological torture. If I'm in a plane crash I want it to be instantaneous.

meonkeys• 1 year ago

Odd, I got a cert warning for that URL. This worked: https://xcancel.com/ShivAroor/status/1933165937399648447

callamdelaney2• 1 year ago

There is a lot of dust at the 20s mark, I’d assume that there shouldn’t be dust on normal takeoffs at busy airports.

cmilton• 1 year ago

It’s possible they had to use part of the runway that most other takeoffs don’t need to extend to. Just pure speculation.

tim3335• 1 year ago

It's interesting that up to about 30s in the video you can see the plane climbing normally, then it loses power and starts falling, about 10s after take off.

Apparently the pilot radioed "Mayday…no thrust, losing power, unable to lift!” 11 secs after takeoff.

It would seem to fit with a bird strike on both engines. Or contaminated fuel I guess. The stuff about flaps seems irrelevant.

Quite likely this and Jeju Air crash in Korea and Sully landing in the Hudson were all caused by bird strike taking out both engines.

Too• 1 year ago

Is it normal to have human operators pointing the camera around like that? It almost look like they expected something to happen.

__m2• 1 year ago

It's not uncommon, people like planes.

nitinreddy88• 1 year ago

This is the full video of take off to crash: https://x.com/ShivAroor/status/1933165937399648447

rigrassm• 1 year ago

Just my personal observations of the video, I'm in no way qualified to speak on the matter.

There's a large plume that looks like smoke to me looks like smoke (could be dust/sand being blown away but I wouldn't think you'd see that much from a busy runway) visible off the left side of the runway. The plane is obscured by that structure when it happens but it looks like it's created at the same time that the plane is leaving the ground.

It looks like the plane stops accelerating completely at that same moment without any change in orientation which, in my head, looks like both engines suffered total failure at the same time.

From my limited knowledge (mostly from Mentour Pilot YT videos), that seems consistent with what you'd see if the plane flew through a large flock of birds that are spread out enough that both engines would be hit at the same time.

Again, purely speculation on my part based solely on what I see in this 1 video.

jharohit• 1 year ago

one dude sitting in 11A jumped out & survived pretty much unharmed. This was the Emergency Exit.

https://x.com/indiatoday/status/1933160181871099943?s=46

mkfs• 1 year ago

Given the fake news that came out of India after Sindoor, with the government insisting no fighters were lost even after third-party confirmation from France and the US, I'm hesitant to believe a purported "sole survivor" silver lining narrative when the only evidence is a few still photos and some brief video clips, especially in the age of AI.

seatac762• 1 year ago

The comment is quite stupid given the context. But I’ll play. The government never denied fighters were lost in the early days they just didn’t confirm it either. They did confirm it later though.

aurizon4• 1 year ago

A sad case. Once they find the data boxes and inspect the data and voice records of the crew they might arrive at an answer. Unlike the USA, India as well as China prioritise political aspects above facts. This leads to the danger of hidden facts that show any officer is at fault. They also have a rigid hierarchy so if a senior officer makes an error, a junior officer dares not correct him and cause the senior to lose 'face'. This has caused plane crashes in India/China in the past.

kylehotchkiss2• 1 year ago

India has an aviation safety record the past 20 years nearly as good as USAs. Your comment isn’t helpful.

aurizon4• 1 year ago

I do not agree

aurizon4• 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zi0HHGA4Ak&ab_channel=Pilot...

aurizon4• 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUFS2np0mKc&ab_channel=Pilot...

teitoklien3• 1 year ago

A Boeing Whistleblower engineer had warned of premature failure of this Boeing 787 Dreamliner and had asked US congress to bring down every single plane of this model type 1 year ago.

He died of “suicide” suspiciously right after. I hope Boeing gets investigated for failure after failure after failure, and crashes it has caused recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/16/boeing-whis...

jibe• 1 year ago

His warnings were about the fuselage construction. This doesn’t appear to be a structural failure, of the type he was worried about.

teitoklien3• 1 year ago

He raised concerns on many issues including the fuselage issue

Salehpour, who has worked at Boeing for more than a decade, says he faced retaliation, including threats and exclusion from meetings, after raising concerns over issues including a gap between parts of the fuselage of the 787.

That particular issue you quote, was only given as a single example

carabiner• 1 year ago

The whistleblower in your linked article, Sam Salehpour, is still alive.

teitoklien3• 1 year ago

Oh ! , you're right I'll edit the comment (wont let me edit anymore, i hope others read this comment).

I mixed him with the other Boeing Whistleblower John Barnett Thanks !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barnett_(whistleblower)

pluc• 1 year ago

"AI crash" results are about to get wild.

constantinum• 1 year ago

Some interesting conversations here in this thread https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-cr...

rich_sasha• 1 year ago

https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-cr...

Still wild speculation, but at least a high proportion of it informed.

impulser_4• 1 year ago

Why is it always foreign airlines that crash?

The US flys significantly more than any country in the world and operates the most Boeing airplanes including the 737 and 737 Max, yet there hasn't been a single major accident like this and the Max crashes in the US.

Are these planes not maintained to the same standards, are the pilots not trained on these types of planes as much as in the US?

amiga3862• 1 year ago

there hasn't been a single major accident like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191

American Airlines Flight 191 crashed shortly after lifting off the runway at Chicago O'Hare Airport [...] The accident was attributed to improper maintenance procedures. The crash resulted in the deaths of all 271 passengers and crew on board, as well as two people on the ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587

American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, New York, just after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport bound for Las Américas International Airport, Santo Domingo. The first officer's overuse of the rudder in response to wake turbulence from a Japan Airlines 747 was cited as cause. All 260 people on board, as well as five people on the ground, died from the crash

I'm going to downvote you now.

decimalenough4• 1 year ago

The first was in 1979, back when planes crashed left and right everywhere.

The second, in 2001, remains the last major accident in the US.

impulser_4• 1 year ago

I'm not talking about accidents from 40 and 20 years ago. I'm talking about the recent 737 accidents both this one and the previous Max crashes.

bravesoul24• 1 year ago

You are comparing the US pop 350m (?) to rest of the world pop 8850m. Sure planes per capita are higher in US but it's an unfair comparison.

Not to say there isn't something there to dive into with data and some countries are safer than others to fly. And definitely some airlines than others.

impulser_4• 1 year ago

Yeah, but the US puts significantly more miles on these planes and yet not a single accident has happened. So it's not the plane, unless these foreign airlines are getting the defunct planes. It has to be either poor maintenance or poor pilot training.

ragazzina2• 1 year ago

Why is it always foreign airlines that crash?

And why is it always Boeing planes?

impulser_4• 1 year ago

I'm not sure, my guess is maybe foreign pilots are less fimilar with Boeing planes. The reason for the Max crashes from the past was due to the pilots not getting enough training on the new plane and made assumptions about it based on the previous generation plane. It wasn't the actual plane that was bad it was Boeing training wasn't good enough for pilots to understand the changes they made.

delta_p_delta_x• 1 year ago

Why is it always foreign airlines that crash?

I suppose US Airways 1549 wasn't American, then. I wonder what the 'US' in the name was for, then. If the bird strike had happened earlier in the flight where the plane would've had less altitude and speed, a very similar result to AI171 could've happened.

Or more recently, I suppose DCA isn't in the US either, and PSA Airlines isn't American.

This comment is subliminal racism disguised as thoughtful 'are these pilots not maintained to the same standards, are the pilots not trained on these types of planes', when the corrupt cesspool that is the US somehow churned out the disaster of an aeroplane system that was MCAS.

What a bell-end of a commenter.

callamdelaney2• 1 year ago

It looks like that runway is relatively short, is it perhaps near the length of runway required to get a plane like that off the ground?

bravesoul24• 1 year ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c626y121rxxo

Goes through the usual speculations. However it mentions interesting the region has a high number of bird strikes.

urbandw311er• 1 year ago

It surely can’t be a coincidence that the sole survivor was sat next to the emergency exit. I still can’t fathom how he walked away from that, though. Or even got out the plane alive.

tim3335• 1 year ago

If you look at the photo a large chunk of plane was stuck in the building https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/world-news/2025/06/1...

I guess he was just lucky to be in a bit sticking out rather than crushed?

grg0• 1 year ago

These are 240 people killed. When will Boeing be sued for negligence?

unionemployee• 1 year ago

Compressor stall. Inexperienced FO shuts down the wrong engine. They then mishandle the other one somehow. Crash.

Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

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