All aircraft crashes horrify us at a visceral stage – however yesterday’s Air India catastrophe is in a league of its personal. Flying is supposed to be the most secure type of journey, so when a near-total calamity reminiscent of this takes place, it speaks to our darkest fears.
Lately, in fact, movies filmed on cell phones usually compound the phobia – and the destiny of Flight 171 has been revealed on transient, grainy footage, shared throughout social media, displaying the aircraft’s gradual descent into a big fireball.
So what actually occurred? Can any classes be realized – and never simply by the airline trade, however by passengers reminiscent of you and me?
Julian Bray is an aviation-security skilled who has suggested on a few of the deadliest air disasters of the previous 40 years. He’s a former guide to British Airways and Alitalia (he additionally revised a number of editions of the Italian service’s official security guide).
He says: ‘The Boeing Dreamliner is automated to the nth diploma. It’s a extremely superior plane, with a number of back-up techniques, which is why I’d look past mechanical failure.’
Bray has analysed a variety of competing theories…
Did the pilots make a horrible error?
On take-off, a pilot will sometimes decrease the aircraft’s flaps to generate extra ‘raise’. However footage of yesterday’s crash seems to indicate that the Air India flight’s flaps are nonetheless stage with its wings. With out the flaps deployed, the aircraft couldn’t have climbed quick sufficient, and a few have instructed that the pilots might need forgotten to deploy them, resulting in catastrophe.
The Gatwick-bound Air India passenger jet, apparently with out its flaps deployed, moments earlier than its devastating crash
Rescuers carry a physique away from the crash website in Ahmedabad
‘It’s bizarre that the flaps appear caught,’ says Bray. ‘They’d have been examined on the runway as a part of the pilots’ pre-flight inspection. Not solely do pilots stroll across the aircraft to bodily examine its hatches are safe, however contained in the cockpit they bear a raft of procedures rigorously designed to verify every thing.’
So may the pilots have forgotten to deploy the flaps? No, insists Bray. ‘Every stage of take-off is a part of a meticulous process monitored by the captain and first officer.’
Some have argued that the web site FlightRadar24 seems to indicate the aircraft beginning its run too far down the runway, the place it could have had only one,900 metres to take off as an alternative of the required 2,800 metres – elevating the chance that the pilots began the take-off run too late.
Once more, Bray will not be satisfied. ‘The pilot had 8,000 hours of expertise and the co-pilot 1,000 hours. Air India has a fairly good security file. Pilots get licensed to fly for less than six months – after that they get placed on a flight simulator and need to be recertified another time.’
That the plane nonetheless had its wheels down when it crashed can also be unimportant, Bray believes. These will not be often raised till an airliner reaches 1,000 ft. The Air India aircraft by no means made it greater than 400ft above the bottom – 625ft above sea stage.
May it have been mechanical failure?
If one thing on the plane will not be working, the captain can order the flight to be grounded.
The truth that Flight 171 took off suggests to Bray that one thing sudden and surprising should have occurred instantly after take-off. The pilot’s misery name of ‘Mayday… no thrust, dropping energy, unable to raise,’ confirms a catastrophic failure, says Bray.
‘You wouldn’t lose energy, or thrust or the flexibility to vary route and not using a main downside additional again within the plane,’ he explains.
May the aircraft have hit a flock of birds?
Chicken strikes stay a severe danger for airliners. Final December, a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 suffered a chicken strike whereas coming in to land at Muan Worldwide Airport in South Korea.
After the pilots aborted the touchdown and tried a second one, the aircraft’s touchdown gear didn’t deploy, inflicting the plane to overshoot the runway and collide with a concrete construction that housed touchdown lights. Of the 181 folks on board, 179 have been killed.
Chicken strike was additionally the reason for the pressured touchdown of a jet in New York in 2009, the so-called ‘Miracle on the Hudson’, when pilot Chesley Sullenberger – later performed by Tom Hanks in a movie in regards to the incident – earned reward for his cool dealing with of the scenario.
However, Bray factors out, neither engine of the Air India flight seems to be smoking because the aircraft went down – if that they had been, it could level to a chicken strike. He provides that Ahmedabad airport has bird-scarer expertise, which detects birds resting on the airport website and emits misery calls from loud audio system mounted on automobiles to scare them away, in addition to utilizing hawks to maintain chicken numbers down.
So may a hawk have been sucked into the engine? Unlikely, says Bray: a chicken strike affecting one engine wouldn’t have been enough to trigger this crash. ‘The aircraft may have taken off with one engine,’ he says. ‘It might have been a bit bumpy, however the pilots ought to have been capable of carry out a “go-around” and fly again to the airport.’
May it have been pilot suicide?
This danger was introduced house in March 2015 when a Germanwings Airbus A320 slammed right into a hillside within the Alps, killing all 150 folks on board.
The co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, was later revealed to have suffered suicidal tendencies, whereas a heart-rending cockpit recording revealed the pilot hammering on the door and begging the co-pilot to open up.
The aircraft explodes in a fireball on influence. It by no means made it greater than 400ft above the bottom
Suicide has additionally been instructed as a proof for the thriller of Malaysia Airways Flight 370, the place an airliner sure from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in 2014 disappeared from radar screens and, it’s believed, circled and crashed within the southern Indian Ocean. Nevertheless, yesterday’s catastrophe, notes Bray, occurred at a stage of the flight when each pilots would have been on the controls and it could have been exhausting for one to crash the aircraft and not using a wrestle.
May it have been a bomb?
In June 1985, one among Air India’s Boeing 747s en route from Montreal to Heathrow went down within the Atlantic, blown aside by a bomb planted by Sikh extremists and killing all 329 on board.
Whereas Flight 171 clearly didn’t explode mid-air, Bray is worried by a puff of smoke that seems to return from the aircraft because it was taking off. One chance he raises for additional investigation is {that a} machine may theoretically have been planted in a extremely delicate location, which didn’t destroy the fuselage but succeeded in severing the wires and techniques that permit pilots to manage the wing flaps and rudder.
A aircraft just like the Dreamliner has a number of emergency techniques, says Bray, however a bomb planted in the best place may trigger the pilots’ whole lack of management.
Nevertheless, it should be harassed that there was no suggestion of terrorism from officers both in India or the worldwide investigators, together with from Britain, who’ve rushed to the scene.
Alternatively – and extra innocently – he says, a consignment of batteries on board might need spontaneously caught fireplace – the risks of so-called ‘thermal runaway’ in lithium batteries are well-known.
Is it nonetheless secure to fly?
This can be a query that many will probably be asking as we method the summer season holidays. And, definitely, readers might be forgiven for questioning whether or not flying has lately change into extra harmful.
Already, 2025 has seen a number of lethal crashes in developed nations, together with a industrial catastrophe in Washington DC that killed 67 folks after an American Airways flight collided with a navy helicopter.
In the meantime, Boeing has suffered a raft of significant accidents lately, together with a terrifying ‘gaping gap’ rising within the facet of the fuselage of a flight from Oregon to California in January 2024, with passengers utilizing the on-board wifi to say goodbye to their family members.
In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing 737 Max jets crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing a complete of 346 passengers and crew.
However regardless of these disasters, statistics present that flying is the most secure it has ever been.
Since 1970, the worldwide fatality fee for air journey has fallen from 4.77 per million passenger journeys to simply 0.05.
Once you take to the air, you now run only one hundredth of the chance of being killed as you probably did half a century in the past. In response to the Worldwide Civil Aviation Organisation, accidents on industrial flights – which may be as small as an plane being broken and needing repairs – have fallen from 4.8 per million departures as lately as 2008 to simply 1.9 per million in 2023.
Statistics from the US Nationwide Transportation Security Board present that between 2007 and 2023, flying was, mile for mile, by far the most secure type of transport. Little consolation, in fact, to the devastated households of the victims of Air India Flight 171.
