Looks like it stalled due to lack of thrust. What could have killed both engines right after takeoff?
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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It seems to climb OK for a little while then suddenly start sinking. There's no sign of an obvious engine problem. Not sure whether we'd be able to see any sign of a bird strike from this far away.
bird strike taking out both engines? nah.
This has to be pilot error. Even at stall, it looks like pilot didn't even try to level out.
It is a Boeing plane. We shouldn't jump to conclusions on the pilots being at fault.
Fair Point
Agree with your comment regarding the pilots but the plane has with Air India for 13 years. If there was a mechanical problem it’s likely to be maintenance at fault. And I say that as someone who goes out of their way to not fly Boeing.
not necessarily. John Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower which died after 2 days into his three day deposition, said that that the assembly line sloppiness would take about ten to twelve years to culminate in a crash.
Let’s see what the black boxes give us. We should have the first information soon. I’m not going to categorically defend Boeing (again, I am not flying on their planes myself) but right now we just have no information on what caused the likely dual engine rollback.
Feeling suicidal?
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bird strike taking out both engines? nah.
Why not? That's the reason Sully had to land on the Hudson.
This has to be pilot error. Even at stall, it looks like pilot didn't even try to level out
They were like less than 200m from the ground. There was literally no space to recover from the stall. You need some altitude to pitch the nose down and recover from a stall.
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Yeah, it's rather strange. There is another one from a perspective where the aircraft almost "overflew" the cameraman (basically at a 5'o clock angle)- it shows them having aileron and elevator control right until they crash. And while the quality is poor, I am somewhat convinced that the RAT has not deployed (yet?)
A bird strike would likely have caused something visible So it doesn't sound like hydraulics or fuel(water in the fueltanks?) or something electronic wise with the engine control. Strange and sad.
I just saw that video and it is really strange. Not so much that rat hasn't been deployed, I don't think they lost hydraulics or electronics and I'm not sure they even reached the minimum speed where the rat would really help.
The strange thing is that it didn't really look like there was very much yaw or rolling which you would expect to see with a fuel system failure. They seemed to be flying straight as an arrow and gliding it down?
Maybe something wrong with thrust control? Kinda crazy.
Yeah,I am not sure if there is a safety interlock with Boeing RATs(and the video is really bad)...so it might be intentional.
It's strange. Personally I currently go with water in the fuel system as the "most likely guess by a armchair pilot"(me),but wouldn't also be surprised being it an electronic error. When that would be the case Boeing would be fucked beyond repair,imho.
Something wrong with the fuel system was my initial armchair guess, but I'm not so sure based off the second vid. One would expect to see some yaw or rolling in an underpowered or lost of power take off with a jet.
Guess we'll have to wait until someone more qualified explains it.
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Is it common for CCTV to track and follow all planes as they take off like the camera in this video seems to be?
I think that's editing, rather than something the camera did.
I don't know for sure, but I imagine all airports have a bunch of cameras. To me it looks like it was a wider shot and someone went and focused on it through the NVR.
You can see a mouse cursor in the video. Someone is manually zooming in and following the plane, likely while reviewing the footage.
Ah, OK yeah that makes sense.
is it going fast enough for the RAT to deploy?
For multi engine planes it's pretty rare, most likely a fuel system failure, or less likely pilot throttling error. My money would be on something with the fuel system.
"Did I fill the water in the right hole on that plane?" -- Guy at the airport driving the freshwater tanker.
I was just thinking about this, perhaps when the aircraft rotated, water or other contaminants got drawn into the fuel system?
Or shifting cargo damaged the fuel lines?
It's always hard to judge AoA unless you're looking side-on with a horizon for reference, but excessive nose-up attitude caused by cargo incorrectly loaded or not secured properly so it shifted aft during rotation could have caused an aerodynamic stall.
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And one man walked away from that. The mind boggles.
No fucking way. IRL plot armour
More like staggered, but yes.
One theory circulating online is that the pilots may have accidentally retracted the flaps instead of the landing gear. Apparently that would result in kind of a flight path seen on the published videos.
While this cannot be confirmed or ruled out with the information we have, in my opinion the available videos seem to kinda support this theory. Initially the aircraft appears to take off and climb normally, but for some reason the gear is not being retracted when usually it would be retracted right after the takeoff.
Naturally the gear could be forgotten or left intentionally down if there were a dual engine failure right after takeoff, for example, but as the videos show no evidence of this, I'm more inclined to believe in simple pilot error.
I did see one person commenting on the other video that they could see the flaps were in the wrong position. And it is conspicuous that the landing gear was not retracted - though could that be because the pilots realized they were in trouble and would need to attempt a crash landing, or were too busy with whatever else had gone wrong?
Are the 787's controls arranged in such a way that you could accidentally retract the flaps instead of the landing gear?
Are the 787's controls arranged in such a way that you could accidentally retract the flaps instead of the landing gear?
Not in a sense that someone could just grab the wrong lever in the dark for example. The levers are in different parts of the cockpit and also shaped very differently. But we humans can do all kinds of weird mistakes that are hard to explain. Almost everyone has experienced this sometimes. Think something like searching for you phone while it's in your hand. Afterwards it's very hard to explain why would anyone do such a silly mistake but it still happened. This would be similar.
The plane was in takeoff config: https://imgur.com/a/JzS3ro9
According to type rated pilots the 787 doesn’t allow you to retract flaps immediately in critical flight after takeoff.
According to type rated pilots the 787 doesn’t allow you to retract flaps immediately in critical flight after takeoff.
That's interesting. Do you have the source for that? I wasn't able to find a definitive answer with google
I think the simplest explanation, and the most likely one, is the pilots were too busy dealing with whatever shit was hitting the fan to raise the landing gear.
And, in my view, that's a loss of engine power for whatever reason, possibly bad fuel.
I'm not an expert, but pretty much every plane crash expert on the planet is watching the same footage and saying they don't know what's happened.
It's absurd to suggest the pilots accidentally retracted the flaps and no one figured that out yet.
I don't get what you mean by "and no one figured that out yet." As you said yourself, no one knows what happened yet. Pretty much all we have at this point are the videos, and all we can confirm from them is a rough flight path of the plane and that the landing gear remained down after what appeared to be a normal takeoff. I haven't seen any footage that clearly shows the state of the flaps with any certainty, but please correct me if I've missed something.
In my mind, that leaves us with three possible scenarios:
- Pilot error (retracting the flaps instead of the landing gear)
- Dual engine failure at the critical moment (there's no evidence of this in the videos, but also nothing ruling it out)
- Something else (we don't know what we don't know)
From the two scenarios (pilot error, engine failure) that fit the flight path from the videos, the option one seems more plausible to me. But that’s just my armchair opinion, it doesn't mean anything. All we can really do is wait for the investigation and the preliminary report.
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