Apparently there was one survivor. He walked away.
British passenger in seat 11A survives India plane crash, reports say
1 Like
Thatās insane.
Iāll be damned, maybe you do want to sit in those seats by the Exit doors?
At the risk of armchair quarterbacking things after this just happened, me thinks it was a dual engine failure on takeoff.
The RAT/Ram Air Turbine was deployed indicating a loss of electrical and they clearly were not climbing.
Even if it was single engine, the 787, like any modern airliner, can perform just fine.
This is such a tragedy.
2 Likes
I have seen dual engine failure as the likely culprit, but that begs the question as to how both engines - normally rock-solid reliable - failed at the same time.
Bird strike is one possible explanation (see Berger, Sullen). But those are some big-ass engines - much bigger than on the A320 that Sully was flying, and he ran into a flock of geese - so it would have to be some big-ass birds to take out both engines on a 787.
Could an electrical failure shut down both engines?
Hereās what the survivor said:
āThirty seconds after takeoff, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly.ā
So the engines didnāt just shut down. Something happened.
Thereās so much redundancy in the electrical systems. Highly unlikely. Not impossible but unlikely.
That thing was running the GE engines, which are nearly bulletproof. It would have to be a flock of big birds, Iād think. The older Rolls Royce engines on the 787 were much more fragile.
1 Like
Yeah. Those things simply donāt fail, so two at the same time has to be something external to them or the aircraft.
1 Like
No, the engine driven generators would be off in an engine failure single or dual- it would be on battery power. The APU can provide electrical for the aircraft, but getting it online/up and running can take a minute or so which they probably didnāt have time to do.
1 Like
Nearly.
Weāve had some catastrophic engine failures the past few years, 2 in 6 mos my first year at SWA. The federales ordered an inspection of all the low pressure fan blades/N1 section/the blades you see in the front of the engine nacelle on all the engines in ā19. The new LEAP engines are incredibly fuel efficient, quiet and have solid performance, much better than the CFMs.
We still have the CFMs on the -700/800s, theyāre damn reliable, and Iāll still take them.
1 Like
Yikes, this start to end video is tough to watch. Low rez at this distance but no obvious flocks of birds. Itās like it ran out of gas or something. @JohnS I donāt see flaps extended but donāt know the wing structure well enough to tell at this distance.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/12/world/video/air-india-plane-crash-expert-analysis-digvid
I never heard of a RAT before.
I still think flaps error is a possibility.
1 Like
Theyāre very common on airliners, though the 737 does not have one oddly.
I have to break away from airline carnage to post this:
Thatās my little brother in his modified Q2! (Donāt ask him how long the build took.) At least one of us is famous now.
7 Likes
Hoover discusses the various theories of the crash.
Holy shit. Iām no aviator but itās hard for me to read this as anything other than suicide by plane.
Cockpit voice recordings seem to point to an horrific error. One pilot turned off the fuel, the other asked why he did that to which he replied that he hadnāt.
An horrific error is the most charitable explanation. Those in the know are saying the fuel switches require a very deliberate action to operate, and doing it by accident is astronomically improbable for a crew with this amount of experience. We may never know what truly happened.
We have 2 different kinds of engine cutoff switches on the 737- one type has a detent position when on, the other is a knob that is in a locked position when on.
Believe me, the engine cutoff switches are designed so that they canāt be āaccidentallyā turned off.
1 Like