Air India Crash

I don't think backtrack is anything to go off. Playback indicates aircraft at more than sufficient speed for take off.

Some kind of mechanical or human failure at play here in my opinion.
 
How tragic. :(
I do find all the commentary from people frothing at the mouth to demonstrate their aviation knowledge, particularly cringe when these things happen. At the same time, it's kind of interesting.
I wonder how many crashes like this would have survivors if there was no fire from the fuel. I'm just saying in a hypothetical situation, say the plane ran on electric engine and fuel fire was completely out of the equation, how many would still perish just due to impact/debris/forces and deformation of the aircraft. I would assume still very high.
 
Christ that's grim, hope it's not too bad :(

Sadly India's H&S culture is virtually non existent and they're one of the most densely populated countries in the world so the aftermath is going to be proper nasty.

Gonna be interesting to see what the cause is, it'll be hard for Boeing to recover from this one I reckon, regardless of who's at fault people will be out for blood and they're on a pretty sketchy footing as it is.
 
Short take off run at max weight with high density altitude conditions set the stage for what was going to be a marginal take off at best.

Don’t forget that ground effect lift/wing drag reduction only lasts until roughly 1/2 wingspan from the ground and getting airborne and staying airborne are two very different things.

In the one video I’ve seen, the aircraft appears to have a high sink rate in the seconds before the impact.
 
esmozz said:
I've only seen a short video so I say it's difficult to say what has gone wrong. Also, I'm not a 787 pilot.

But it is possible to take-off in ground effect and and then lose that lift once airborne but I honestly can't tell if that happened here. Regarding intersection take-offs - they're completely normal provided the correct performance calculations have been done.

However misidentifying the correct intersections has happened in the past and led to accidents - I know of one case where they overran the runway, taking out the runway lights before getting the aircraft airborne (with quite significant damage).

But as a modern aircraft - the 787 should have an on board warning system which will tell you if you are using the incorrect intersection (or if the runway length is insufficient - I've never used it though so I don't know the exact details of how it works). I think it may be an optional extra however - Boeings are like BMW's where you have to specify pretty much every feature you want when purchasing (for an additional cost, of course).

I suspect the FBW system on the 787 will not allow you so stall the aircraft (it will allow you to pull back to just below the stall and keep you there if you continue to pull back). If you're too slow you are still going down.

To me that's what it looks like. How it got so slow - I don't know, incorrect flap selection or some kind of mechanical fault, I would guess.

The 787 should be a very safe aircraft.
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But you are a pilot (If I remember from the other incident threads) so it’s valuable input to help my engineer brain think about it.

It would seem to be loss of thrust for some reason - if the RAT has deployed automatically which has been mentioned then I would expect that due to sudden loss of electrical power (or hydraulic, depending on the 787 architecture)

I don’t think there was enough time for the pilot’s to have done it, or really done ANYTHING in terms of procedures although they did get a mayday call out. Gear is still down too which implies a distraction at the moment of takeoff, and it should be fine on a single engine at that point I think?
 
jaybee said:
How tragic. :(
I do find all the commentary from people frothing at the mouth to demonstrate their aviation knowledge, particularly cringe when these things happen. At the same time, it's kind of interesting.
I wonder how many crashes like this would have survivors if there was no fire from the fuel. I'm just saying in a hypothetical situation, say the plane ran on electric engine and fuel fire was completely out of the equation, how many would still perish just due to impact/debris/forces and deformation of the aircraft. I would assume still very high.
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Battery fires are pretty intense.
 
jaybee said:
I wonder how many crashes like this would have survivors if there was no fire from the fuel. I'm just saying in a hypothetical situation, say the plane ran on electric engine and fuel fire was completely out of the equation, how many would still perish just due to impact/debris/forces and deformation of the aircraft. I would assume still very high.
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It's difficult to say, as it depends very much on the context, e.g. speed, angle and terrain.

There have been cases where people have survived crashes that looked completely unsurvivable, even when fire was involved. Japan Air Lines Flight 123 is an example of this and more would have likely survived if emergency services got to the crash site sooner.
 
Zero survivors according to the Police Chief of the area. Wholly unsurprising to anybody who has seen the ground footage of the aftermath, some of the most haunting scenes you can see.
 
200sols said:
Battery fires are pretty intense.
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Yes, but they don’t have the same pressure wave as a fuel vapour explosion. Jet fuel is basically kerosene these days which is less flammable and explodey than gasoline, but you’re still getting a blast wave that venting/burning battery packs won’t produce until they cook after burning for a while.
 
Would this be poor maintenance issue I mean as somebody pointed out India dosnt have great health and safety.

Mad that any airport is so close to human population only takes something like this and loads of people on the ground can end up killed to.
 
Diddums x said:
Christ that's grim, hope it's not too bad :(

Sadly India's H&S culture is virtually non existent and they're one of the most densely populated countries in the world so the aftermath is going to be proper nasty.

Gonna be interesting to see what the cause is, it'll be hard for Boeing to recover from this one I reckon, regardless of who's at fault people will be out for blood and they're on a pretty sketchy footing as it is.
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There's no control of the site. People just coming and going as they please. Seemingly taking photos of body parts is just the norm there.
 
Penfold101 said:
But you are a pilot (If I remember from the other incident threads) so it’s valuable input to help my engineer brain think about it.

It would seem to be loss of thrust for some reason - if the RAT has deployed automatically which has been mentioned then I would expect that due to sudden loss of electrical power (or hydraulic, depending on the 787 architecture)

I don’t think there was enough time for the pilot’s to have done it, or really done ANYTHING in terms of procedures although they did get a mayday call out. Gear is still down too which implies a distraction at the moment of takeoff, and it should be fine on a single engine at that point I think?
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I think an important clue is the deployment of the RAT - which, unless I'm very much mistaken, has no purpose under normal operations and only activates if there's a failure of some kind (or is manually deployed). A quick google would suggest a loss of power on both engines, loss of all hydraulic power or complete electrical failure. It's difficult to know what the pilots should have done without knowing what has happened.

The engines on a 787 are huge and I don't know if a bird strike could take out both out - I'm pretty sure it's never happened on an aircraft that size before. Fuel contamination could do it maybe.

The MAYDAY is odd and could be a symptom of panic or it could be that they realised there's nothing they can do. It's actually the last thing you do in an emergency - there is literally nothing anyone on the ground can do to help.

The 787 should be able to climb away on a single engine, if they've done the performance calculations that's all taken into account - although the first thing you should do in the event of an engine failure is raise the gear.

Regarding a total hydraulic failure - the aircraft appears to be under control to a degree, i.e. wings level and a fairly normal pitch attitude, so I don't know here.

Loss of thrust seems to most likely to me, at least. But how?

I'll just throw this out there - its a complete guess and I have no specialist knowledge here but a software fault in the engine FADEC computers could cause the engine thrust to roll back to idle. There have been rumours of such things in the past. And without going down a conspiracy blackhole the Air France Airbus crash in Toulouse and Mull of Kintyre Chinook crash both dismissed that possibility, with rather a great degree of controversy.
 
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bingham67 said:
Would this be poor maintenance issue I mean as somebody pointed out India dosnt have great health and safety.

Mad that any airport is so close to human population only takes something like this and loads of people on the ground can end up killed to.
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A lot of airports are surrounded by residential areas. London City is great example. The old Hong Kong airport required extra pilot qualifications to land or take off large aircraft as they had to slalom high rise buildings
 
Albaba said:
The flaps were fully retracted and the landing gear was down, at this point in the flight the opposite should have been the case....
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From the video in the ops post the flaps do look to be up and not correctly configured for take off. Also you can see the plane sink and that is the behaviour expected and has been seen many times when planes take off configured incorrectly for take off. Many such accidents have happened and ended up in this manner and the plane reached a maximum altitude of 620-625 feet according to some flight tracking sites.

Pilot/copilot error sadly by the looks of this one :( so far. But lets wait for more footage and seems the tail section is in good condition at the crash site so recovery of the black boxes shouldn't be an issue and then they can check the FDR and CVR (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder) to confirm the take off configuration and what alarms can be heard were going off on the CVR and what was being said by the pilots, seems they did send a mayday too, but at what point of the take off.

The 787 Dreamliner is a good plane and not like the Max series that had their issues and poor Pilot training requirements from Boeing regarding the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).

Sad day seeing another commercial airliner accident that could have been avoided from what has been shown and said so far. RIP to the passengers and crew. :(
 
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Saw a video of it, looked like zero power to me, reminiscent of blocked fuel lines. No sign of physical damage, bird strike or anything else.
 
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