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 theyād scraped something on takeoff hard enough to take out both engines, thereād 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 itās 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 Iām 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.
Itās a bit like the reason most flight attendants in the emergency exit jump seat across from you wonāt talk with you during the actual takeoff and landing: theyāre mentally walking through a potential emergency and what theyād then need to do. Every single time. So if it ever happens, thereās muscle memory, 10000x over.
EDIT 2: see the Flightradar24 comment below, it looks like they did backtrack and use the full runway.
CCTV capture of complete takeoff: https://x.com/ShivAroor/status/1933165937399648447
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.
Apparently, there's a survivor.
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
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 āsuicideā 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...
Flight Crew
Sumeet Sabharwal ā Captain - 8800+ flying hours Clive Kunder ā First Officer 1 - 1100+ flying hours
Cabin Crew
Aparna Mahadik ā Cabin Executive-1 Shradha Dhavan ā 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.
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...
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
Seems like they lost power? https://x.com/georgiameloniii/status/1933091545248641248
I believe this is the first hull loss of a Boeing 787.
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.
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.
one dude sitting in 11A jumped out & survived pretty much unharmed. This was the Emergency Exit.
I will reserve my judgement but Boeing canāt catch a break.
This is the first fatal crash of a 787.
https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-cr...
Still wild speculation, but at least a high proportion of it informed.
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...
This is the full video of take off to crash: https://x.com/ShivAroor/status/1933165937399648447
"AI crash" results are about to get wild.
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.
Some interesting conversations here in this thread https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-cr...
It surely canāt be a coincidence that the sole survivor was sat next to the emergency exit. I still canāt fathom how he walked away from that, though. Or even got out the plane alive.
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?
Compressor stall. Inexperienced FO shuts down the wrong engine. They then mishandle the other one somehow. Crash.
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
Friends from the city told me it crashed into hostel or mess hall of a medical college.
These are 240 people killed. When will Boeing be sued for negligence?
This is the 4th within less than a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_aircraft_acc...
Avherald seems overwhelmed. Any other sources for more information?
Is it an old or the newer aircraft?
From the videos online, it looks like the plane stalled.
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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...
Just fell out of the sky. Whatever went wrong clearly wasn't save-able via pilot skill
Thereās a WSJ report with a free link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255817
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?
Gentle tip from a lifelong aviation enthusiast: wait one week before reading on causation.
Exposing yourself to first-week speculation isnāt just unproductive, itās often counterproductive since the actual findings can rhyme with the false speculation closely enough that you wind up muddling the two in your mind.