Expert's theory on terrifyingly simple
mistake he thinks Air India co-pilot made
that caused crash and killed 265
Daily Mail (UK),
by
Joe Hutchison
Original Article
Posted By: JoElla Bee,
6/14/2025 4:29:27 AM
An aviation expert believes the co-pilot on Air India flight AI171 pulled the plane's wing flaps instead of retracting the landing gear, causing the plane to crash. Commercial airline pilot and YouTuber Captain Steve, who analyzes plane crashes and close calls, gave his theory on the incident which killed 241 people on board.
The London-bound 787 Dreamliner began losing height moments after take-off and crashed in a fireball over a residential area in the Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
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Reply 1 - Posted by:
Msquared112 6/14/2025 6:43:23 AM (No. 1964034)
Rookie. Who does that? DEI hires?
13 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
Catfur27 6/14/2025 7:07:51 AM (No. 1964041)
I never even heard of Ahmedabad...and it has over 5 million people !! ( only NYC is bigger here ??) ...there's a LOT of people in India .
16 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
bpl40 6/14/2025 7:35:41 AM (No. 1964047)
The last transmission from the pilot was “ I have no thrust”. Th at could be the distraction that prevented immediate retraction of the landing gear.Why would both engines lose thrust at such a critical moment. Unless …the Filght Management System was remotely tampered with. That would mean the 787’s security code was compromised. Who in the world is capable of that??
12 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
Mcscow sailor 6/14/2025 7:57:20 AM (No. 1964050)
Add to these observables, where equipment or pilot error…the plane was (ahem) fully loaded, the temp was around 115 F, with a corresponding high density altitude at takeoff. The pilot planned for and did use all of the available runway, but 787 performance charts suggest he more.
8 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
Strike3 6/14/2025 8:26:00 AM (No. 1964062)
That's quite possible. We don' need no steenking takeoff checklist.
5 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
jc96 6/14/2025 8:40:27 AM (No. 1964067)
The various video I've seen... I'd have expected more fire from a fully fuel laden 787. We'll see. Ciao, Cris
2 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
franq 6/14/2025 8:53:34 AM (No. 1964076)
If true, that's the kind of mistake not even a rookie pilot should make. Have seen comments that indicate loss of both engines would be near impossible. The flight recorder should tell.
6 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
AntiStatist 6/14/2025 9:24:22 AM (No. 1964088)
Looking at the video, the pilots had not set takeoff flaps.
You have to set flaps for lift at takeoff speed.
The engines were providing thrust but the wings were not generating sufficient lift without flaps.
I understand that the pilots used an intersection takeoff, which means they did not make available all of the runway for the ground roll, and that with temps at 100 degrees.
This one is pilot error. Upon pilot error.
11 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
cor-vet 6/14/2025 9:40:34 AM (No. 1964101)
DEI?
3 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
Hazymac 6/14/2025 9:47:35 AM (No. 1964106)
#8's got it. The idiot pilots forgot to extend the flaps for takeoff, and the jet never achieved lift. Basic error, fatal error.
11 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
Vaquero45 6/14/2025 9:52:25 AM (No. 1964111)
An intersection takeoff? In a 787 near max gross weight?
Pilot error, plain and simple.
6 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
mossley 6/14/2025 10:21:23 AM (No. 1964131)
Recently, I've had the "Mayday: Air disasters" channel on Youtube playing in the background. The sheer number of ways a pilot can crash a plane by a stupid mistake is staggering. Air India apparently is near bankruptcy, so it's probably cutting corners in maintenance and not hiring the best pilots. The high heat and humidity didn't help, either.
7 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
DVC 6/14/2025 10:40:29 AM (No. 1964138)
"Terrifyingly simple"? Only if you are a total incompetent, as far as an airline pilot goes. The flap and gear levers have for a LONG time been located away from each other, and in most aircraft the landing gear lever is shaped like a wheel, typically a circular handle about 1.5 inches in diameter on the end of the gear lever.
Typically the flap lever is located well away from the gear lever, and is shaped like an airfoil . Gear lever is typically on the instrument panel, and the flap lever is typically on the console. NOT easy to 'confuse the two' if the person is even remotely competent for that job. The handles look and feel very different, and are not right next to each other.
My original comment on this was that "at that phase of the flight there are a lot of things going on in the cockpit as the aircraft is being reconfigured from takeoff condition to establishing a climb. My bet is somebody pushed the wrong button."
Flaps and gear are levers, but the "push the wrong button" was meant to be a generic term for making a reconfiguration error.
Retracting the flaps when the aircraft is too slow to fly without them would cause the aircraft to sink rapidly, and other than reversing the flap motion instantly, nothing would keep that aircraft in the air.
I refuse to fly on third world airlines because way too many of their pilots are extremely poorly trained, bordering on incompetent.
The flight data recorder will tell the tale. It has a huge amount of data recorded on an aircraft this new, so if this happened, the airspeed data and flap position data will show it.
12 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
DVC 6/14/2025 10:43:54 AM (No. 1964140)
Re #1, third wold airlines hire their third world people, and often have extreme difficulty finding highly qualified people, so they take whoever they can. I will not fly on third world airlines, hard. absolute rule.
I learned this in Russia which had dozens of literally 'city airlines' with two or three aircraft, and staffed by incompetents, aircraft maintained by drunks. I would only fly on Aeroflot or two other top tier Russian airlines. A number of times I had to take overnight trains because the only airlines were on the Dept of Energy no-fly recommendation list and I wasn't going to go against it.
12 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
DVC 6/14/2025 11:07:14 AM (No. 1964157)
Current Boeing 777 pilot who runs his 'blancolirio' channel played an audio tape of the Air India aircraft. There was a distinctive roaring sound of the "RAT" or Ram Air Turbine. This is a miniature windmill that folds out into the airstream in an emergency to provide limited electrical and hydraulic power to keep the aircraft controls powered. There are multiple cases of various engine and hydraulic pump and generator failures, all MULTIPLE simultaneous failures, which will automatically extend the RAT.
He also points out that the flaps for takeoff is the 5 degree stetting, and that the poor video shows that the landing gear retraction cycle seemed to have been interrupted. This nydraulically powered, and may indicate a hydraulic system failure (triple redundant, on most airliners), which fits with a RAT deployment, although the RAT is no intended to power gear retraction, it is for maintaining flight controls.
While it could be as simple as the retraction of the flaps while too slow, the clear sound, and several eyewitnesses saying that the RAT was out tends to point to a major electrical and/or hydraulic failure. This could be due to dual engine failures. IMO, the most likely way to get dual engine failures is to interrupt the fuel flow. How this might be done.....manually? Huge error, if done.
The orange box data will tell the tale.
7 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
LC Chihuahua 6/14/2025 11:13:32 AM (No. 1964160)
Wait and see what the flight recorders say but this sounds like one or more human errors in piloting or maintenance.
6 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
Miamiwarrior 6/14/2025 11:16:13 AM (No. 1964163)
This is precisely what happened the copilot made a terrible error. He pulled up the flaps rather than the landing gear. This created no lift for the airliner. A tragic mistake. This can be seen in the video. No year long investigation needed.
3 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
Bogasso 6/14/2025 11:25:58 AM (No. 1964168)
I don’t think the resolution of the videos is good enough to tell whether the flaps are deployed 5°, if that’s what was called for. It did lift off the runway and start to climb when the PIC rotated. Then it quit climbing and started to sink. And the audio from one of the videos sounded like the RAT had deployed. A commenter on Blancolirio who knows 787 systems provided a list of all the conditions that trigger RAT deployment.
I don’t think that’s enough info to claim sabotage, DEI/incompetence or even “Boeing = junk” as a cause.
9 people like this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
snowoutlaw 6/14/2025 11:43:22 AM (No. 1964174)
Wouldn't the flight computers make this mistake very hard to make?
3 people like this.
Reply 20 - Posted by:
DVC 6/14/2025 12:07:04 PM (No. 1964182)
Re #10, unlikely. The aircraft wouldn't have gotten as far as it did without any flaps/slats. With the all too common "clean wing takeoff' error, the aircraft lifts off but can't climb beyond maybe 50-100 ft altitude, and crashes immediately off the end of the runway.
This aircraft got higher, and went farther. It couldn't have been a clean wing at takeoff. Perhaps retracting the flaps, but there are indications that more was going on. The Ram Air Turbine was apparently extended. This could be autiomatic or manually deployed. That seems to indicate an engine or electrical/.hydraulic problem.
5 people like this.
Reply 21 - Posted by:
WWIIDaughter 6/14/2025 12:30:28 PM (No. 1964194)
Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan engaged in armed warfare in May 2025 when Islamic activists murdered 25 Indian tourists. India has more 13% Muslim population. Pakistan is 97% Muslim. Malaysia Airlines flight 370 "disappeared" 2014. Although Malaysian government (65% Muslim population) denied intentional sabotage by the crew, the U.S, and other countries have stated that someone in the cockpit engineered the whole thing. Who were the crew for this current "accident?"
4 people like this.
Reply 22 - Posted by:
lynngirl122 6/14/2025 12:50:36 PM (No. 1964204)
At least it was quick.
4 people like this.
Reply 23 - Posted by:
franq 6/14/2025 2:18:55 PM (No. 1964230)
What amazes me is that there was one survivor. It wasn't his day.
3 people like this.
Reply 24 - Posted by:
bighambone 6/14/2025 4:42:37 PM (No. 1964300)
Well the wing flaps should have been down and the landing gear should have been up. Unfortunately from the video it appears that the reverse occurred. Beyond that the abuse of the crash will have to await the investigative findings.
1 person likes this.
Reply 25 - Posted by:
DVC 6/14/2025 5:39:40 PM (No. 1964323)
The takeoff position for flaps is normally only 5 degrees, which would be very difficult to see in the crappy video. Landing flaps are like 25 or 30 degrees which would be easily seen in most videos.....of course, this aircraft wasn't landing.
If the RAT automatically deployed, that would indicate electrical and/or hydraulic failure....even though there are typically three hydraulic systems, with electrical powered backup. One audio tape sounds like the distinctive roar of the RAT....sounds like a small aircraft propeller at full takeoff power.
1 person likes this.
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