What could have caused the Air India plane crash? The theories explored

Aviation experts have studied footage of the Boeing 787-8 Air India disaster and pointed to a few possible reasons and explanations.

New footage shows the Air India flght struggling to take off.

Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and his first officer would have quickly realised that their aircraft was not handling normally as the Boeing 787 lifted off at Ahmedabad airport.

Video of the full take-off run shows the airliner rising with apparent difficulty after covering nearly the whole length of runway 23 before leaving the ground. The pilots reported “mayday” — a distress situation — to controllers about 60 seconds after starting their take-off roll.

Pilots trying to understand the events that led the 787-8 series airliner to struggle to climb away before running out of lift and slamming into a building focused on a possible loss of engine thrust and also on the apparently abnormal configuration of the wing flaps and landing gear.

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There was no single line of expert speculation over the cause and theories on aviation sites ranged from engine problems and other technical malfunctions to possible crew errors.

The 787 Dreamliner, Boeing’s star product, has been in airline service since 2011 and is packed with safety systems. It can, like all airliners, climb away even if a single engine fails. It would also refuse to start its roll down the runway if pilots had failed to set the wing flaps and slats that increase lift for take-off.

The Air India plane only got to 600 feet before it crashed. Picture: Supplied

Video images of the crippled aircraft wallowing low over the ground suggested that it may not have been under full power, experts said. Footage of it in the air showed that the flaps appeared to have been completely or partially retracted from take-off position. That would have deprived the airliner of the lift crucial for avoiding the aerodynamic stall that it experienced when the pilot pulled the nose up in a desperate final attempt to stay airborne.

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The aircraft was flying at 174 knots over the ground in its last data transmission, which would have been just over its stalling speed of 140-160 knots without flaps, according to Boeing data.

Landing gear is normally retracted just after take-off, as soon as the non-flying pilot calls out “positive climb rate”. This reduces the drag from the air and enables the aircraft to climb better. Initially the Air India Boeing did climb and reached some 400ft, according to flight data, yet it kept its wheels down, making a stall harder to avoid.

This could have been an oversight by pilots or a decision by the captain to leave the landing gear extended to absorb the expected impact with the ground, airline pilots said.

The back of Air India flight 171 buried in a building housing doctors and their families. Picture: AFP.

Denys Davydov, a Boeing 737 captain with a Ukrainian airline, said: “It looks like the flaps were up and the gear was down which was the strangest thing for me.”

Normal procedure would have meant leaving the flaps deployed until the aircraft reached a higher altitude, he said on his Pilot Blog channel. Premature retraction of the slats brought down a British European Airways Trident jet at Staines, Surrey, in June 1972, killing all 118 on board.

Pilots speculated on aviation sites over a possible lack of thrust for the Boeing, which would have been fully fuelled and weighing some 230 tonnes for its nine-hour flight to London. The extremely rare phenomenon of a double engine loss could only be explained by something like a bird strike or fuel contamination, experts said.

The cause of the Air India crash will only be determined once the black box flight recorders are retrieved and downloaded. Nothing so far has pointed to a technical failure but the disaster is the latest blow to Boeing after years of scrutiny over the safety of its airliners. Since two of its new 737 Max airliners crashed in 2018 and 2019, the company has come under federal investigation over claims that it knowingly allowed faulty products to leave its factories.

The Air India crash — the first operational loss of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner — follows three major airline disasters and one serious crash in the past six months. On December 24, an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 airliner crashed in Kazakhstan after being hit by Russian anti-aircraft fire over the Russian town of Grozny. Of the 67 people on board, 38 were killed. Both pilots and a flight attendant were among the survivors.

Rescue officials carry a victim's body from a building that Air India flight 171 crashed into. Picture: AFP.

On December 29, only two flight attendants survived when a Boeing 737 of Korea’s Jeju Air slammed into an embankment while trying to land after an engine failure at Muan airport. A bird strike and possible crew errors have been blamed for the disaster, which killed 179.

In the first airline disaster in the US since 2009, a Canadian-built Bombardier CRJ700 airliner collided with an army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac river in Washington DC on January 29. All 67 people on board both aircraft died in the crash, which followed the apparent failure of the helicopter pilot to spot the airliner as it approached Washington National Airport.

On February 17, a Delta airlines Bombardier CRJ900 lost a wing and flipped over when it made an exceptionally hard landing in poor weather at Toronto airport in Canada. All 80 people on board survived but 21 were injured.

The Times