Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

From the television era: Don't watch news channels; important news will be on all the channels.

Suggestions for some sources to read? I know the Economist, anything else others would recommend?

Pro tip from another rando: If you hear about it from friends or coworkers, don't assume it's pressing.

It might just be sensational and of course they repeat it, just like they'd send on a chain letter/email etc. back in the day.

Form your own opinion, based on multiple source plus your own judgement.

"The Week" is a great magazine for this purpose.

pro tip from an internet addict - r/aviation has a great community of pilots and aviation techs with insightful comments.

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1l9hqzp/air_india...

The problem is, they often assume you already read the news and don’t say what happen just provide the analysis without context.

Heck, Spiegel does that with news on the same day. You get some background article without starting with the facts of what happened, as if everybody reads the news every two hours.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

+1

“news” detox is as important as a healthy or non existent interaction with social media.

Best decision I’ve ever made. It’s honestly so exhausting reading news regularly.

I don't recommend this; instead, I recommend reading factual reporting, not 'analysis' which often comes with inherent political bent/bias.

Good way to cure a news addiction: Read news from years ago, see how much of it was actually accurate and meaningful in retrospect.

Totally agreed.

I stopped reading/watching/listening to the news about 2 years ago and I am blissfully unaware of what is going on in the world. I read hacker news every once in a while and even comment on some of the stories shown here but I select very strictly the topics I interact with.

News organizations these days are all pushing an agenda. Whether it is pro [insert-topic-of-choice-here] or against [insert-topic-of-choice-here] and that irks me when they represent themselves as impartial and unbiased.

If I want to read some propaganda, I know where to find it.

If you don't read news, you are uninformed. If you read news, you are misinformed

Similarly The Guardian has a weekly publication - https://support.theguardian.com/uk/subscribe/weekly

Unfortunately it doesn't appear to have a digital option?

Reading one source of news only, especially one with such marked bias, is bound to leave you with a limited worldview. Consult instead a variety of sources.

Yep, I subscribe to the Le Monde weekly, 10 printed pages newspaper delivered home. Enough to know what's what and done.

[flagged]

I used to do that too, but the Rittenhouse incident was the final straw for me. I remember reading in the magazine that he "shot into the crowd", but by that point I had already watched the video analysis on the New York Times's YouTube channel which showed that he only shot at people who attacked him. That was what the jury agreed with as well.

In the end, I think the most accurate place to get your news from is a history book.

It’s not online, but Delayed Gratification is a quarterly news magazine that reports on the news of the _previous_ quarter with an up-to-date perspective. It’s British but covers world news.

https://www.slow-journalism.com/

I suppose one way (now that you've brought this up, which is totally valid), is to openly state that this is what we know right now, and that often changes in a week.

And that could itself be a tangent in the conversation, alternate theories. (Or might be a frustrating one if nobody is receptive)

There's always the weather... how's yours? Mine is warm, a bit of cloudy, and a bit of smoke in the air from PNW fires.

He made a quick video on this one, but just listing questions we don't have answers to yet, and warning that there will be plenty of speculation. I expect he will have several follow ups as more facts come up.

Yep, looks like the return of regular airline crashes. The 2010s will probably be the apogee of airline safety for some time to come.

I haven't by any means been keeping count but it does feel like there have been a lot more incidents that usual this year, and certainly a lot more fatalities.

What I can't work out whether that's recency bias, or because I've been watching a lot of MentourPilot with our daughters so I'm simply more attuned to this kind of news, or if there really are more of them.

I certainly don't know if the rate of incidents per passenger mile flown is higher than usual.

Fuel dumping is overwhelmingly to prevent or minimize an overweight landing and subsequent brake/tire overheating and inspections. It’s got not much to do with minimizing fuel-fed fire after impact.

I hope he makes $20k. Or more. I enjoy his content and the insight he brings. Also many people make money from the tragedy of others. Morticians, coffin builders, clean up crews, construction workers, concrete companies…I could probably come up with 100 more examples. Just because their work is from the result of something tragic doesn’t mean it is any less important.

Most of his videos are on crashes. He has said he won't speculate on active investigations, but has already done videos on what is known, and preliminary reports.

You're upset that he's benefiting by providing an expert perspective on a topic you're interested in?

Boy, you must be upset about pretty much everything on the internet. Except for hn. Paul Graham just runs this site out of his own benevolence, nothing else.

I find MentourPilot’s consultant persona grating and avoid his content, but in terms of sensationalism there are far worse.

What do you think the big media outlets make on crashes? And they suck putting all kinds of unwarranted speculation and bullshit on the airwaves.

Media isn't free, especially well produced media that's taken it's time to research.

Agreed, but it doesn't look like AI. Video(s) look real to my untrained eyes. Everyone is going to speculate regardless of the top level disclaimer. I rather just at least present what data is available as of now.

The city the incident took place in has a subreddit. Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself. It's a bit NSFW at the moment.

Some people trust their own thinking to judge what they see.

We know it called mayday and then lost communication. It also stopped transmitting GPS data.

Looking at this it likely lost all electric power. The electric power comes from generators driven by the turbines.

If you lose both turbines you lose electricity. You also lose the hydraulic system so you can not get in the gear or change flaps.

Occam's razor checks out.

I wish every news was held to this standard.

A 787 can still climb with flaps up and two healthy engines. In the video that was posted everywhere, you can CLEARLY hear the RAT spin, which gets deployed automatically when both engines go out.

Or birds hitting both engines. But that must have been a big flock then

There is, but dumping takes time, and it’s not done over populated areas. It would be low on the pilots’ checklist in an emergency.

They were only 600ft in the air, barely anything would have got out before they hit the ground and you'd have just set non-zero amount of innocent people on fire in all likelihood when the crash ignited the trail they'd left.

There is a dump fuel button if you're not in the middle of a populated city and you're far enough in the sky you've got a few minutes.

Most airplanes can dump fuel, but it's not an immediate thing, so not really applicable here (and obviously doing it over a city is to be avoided as well).

It's primarily needed for weight management in planes that can take off heavier than they can safely land. I.e. if the plane had enough control to abort the flight and return to the airport, then it might have been appropriate.

It's possible to dump fuel but you don't have time to dump enough in an emergency

because painting an entire neighborhood in flammable fluid isn't safe... if it doesn't catch fire it'll corrode everything it touches.

most planes can't dump fuel anymore. if it's a serious enough emergency you land overweight. If it's not then you fly long enough to burn it off and land below max landing weight.

That makes no sense, and is not consistent with video evidence. Max flaps (40 degrees or so) are typically used only for landing. That is very obvious when you see it! Usual flap setting for takeoff is on the order of 5–15 degrees.

On a long enough timeline we all die. Guess we shouldn't ever have "fun".

I don't think you'd expect any control inputs in that scenario. They were level with a reasonable pitch angle. Aircraft attitude was fine, they just didn't have enough power to arrest the descent. Such a loss of power with a full load of fuel definitely indicates a swift catastrophic failure to the engines at least.

The engines power the hydraulic actuators in an aircraft an aircraft of that size cannot be trivially controlled without that hydraulic system. The APU should have been started to provide backup power in the case of engine failure but during take-off there is already very little time to do anything and it's possible that the sudden workload overloaded both the pilot and copilot or some other human factors were involved.

That being said, in the video I saw, the aircraft was already going too slow to realistically recover. And all you would get at that point is just an extended duration of glide which at best would let you find a less populated area to crash into.

What would you do with the controls? There wasn't an alternative landing area they could have got to.

About all they could probably do was to try to get the engines going.

I don't really know enough about this, but what would you expect the pilots to do with that control if they don't have any thrust? Unless there was a suitable landing spot very, very close I don't see what they could do even if they have full control of the plane. There is nothing they can do except getting the engines to work to avoid a crash, the only thing controls would give them is the option to choose a slightly different place to crash.

But also how long after take off do you retract the flaps? Can it be a pilot error (took off without flaps?). It happened more than once in the past, though I thought a modern plane like the dreamliner would make that mistake nearly impossible.

Why is it a thing? Everything else in aviation seems to have good amounts of checks, balances and buffers. It feels the same to me as skimping a couple percent on fuel or doing less frequent maintenance. Both also reduce turnaround time.

It looks like it was fast enough that most people on board probably didn't realize they were about to crash, or they crashed within seconds of the realization. As torturous as that must have been, it was thankfully very very brief.

I meant the section of the plane was between front and center, behind business class.

I cannot comment on this specific point, but /r/aviation in general is terrible after an accident.

That doesn't make sense. 100+mph into terrain is going to go way worse for you out of a seat than in it.

You ~cannot~ don't want to "bail just before impact"

A plane at takeoff is pressurized, and that pressure holds the doors closed, as well as the physical locks. You cannot open it.

Don't believe random reddit comments. Average people know less than nothing about planes.

Speaking of random people knowing less than nothing: I believed that at takeoff and landing, planes were slightly overpressurized to increase airframe rigidity. I think I got that impression from a very old pilot, so either it used to be true or it was never true and I'm just wrong.

This person probably did not bail out of the plane in order to survive, but maybe you COULD open the doors at takeoff and landing, not that you want to.

Additional edit: I've actually flown a few times while running the barometer on my phone for funzies. I might be able to find a log of data to confirm or deny my mistaken belief! It's fun to do because you can see the pressurization increase signalling that the pilots are preparing for descent even before they tell you!

He did not leave the plane, he said he was on the previous flight from Delhi to Ahmedabad, before the plane then went on to do the Ahmedabad - London flight when it crashed. You can see his flight ticket in the tweet.

It reads to me as if he was on the flight before the doomed flight.

India is a large country, so a plane travelling a route like Delhi→Ahmedabad→London isn't unusual, with passengers able to board and disembark in Ahmedabad.

(There may also be security rules like requiring continuing passengers to disembark with their hand luggage before reboarding. I don't know, it's 15+ years since I took a flight like this.)

In other words, they are the "No green jellybeans" clause, proving the vendor didn't thoroughly check all the details.

I'm a system engineer - the hardware kind, not the more familiar network kind - and that is my job.

Air India has a long history of poor maintenance. Not many crashes, but lots of reports of poor cabin maintenance, broken electronics, air conditioning not working, etc.

Is the inflight map for the passengers on the minimum equipment list?

It’s wildly unrealistic to expect maintenance to fix 100.0% of issues, and to fix them immediately at that. There’s a balance to be struck with on-time performance that will naturally prioritize safety critical maintenance while postponing cosmetic repairs until they can be performed without schedule pressure.

I don’t think this is necessarily the case here.

Airlines are large and heavily regulated organizations, and passenger amenities (once successfully certified) might just not be in the loop for mandatory maintenance cycles and certifications.

Maintenance of IFE units vs. avionics or the airframe itself might as well be performed by completely different contractors, maintenance crews etc.

Sure, nice brown M&Ms type relation. But I've encountered entertainment systems failures on Virgin, Emirates, Qatar and they're all among the safest airlines according to this https://airlinelist.com/

And to be fair, there is AFAIK absolutely no reason to believe Jon Barnett's didn't take his own life. Indeed there is overwhelming evidence that he pulled the trigger, alone.

Now whether he was driven to suicide by Boeing's unrelenting and unending persecution campaign against him as a whistleblower is another, perfectly valid question.

Indeed. There were survivors from that horrific Korean flight that crashed into the concrete wall.

holy shit. relatively unscathed at that. I retract my statement obviously.

he must've been thrown out at just the right angle to not hit too much along the way...

Sure, if you don't want your wings anymore. The wings are the primary fuel tanks. You can drain the fuel out during flight but the process can take hours.

The plane crashed shortly after takeoff in a populated area. Dropping 100 tons of fuel or tanks on buildings is not good.

Large jets can usually dump fuel but this is something that takes time. It's sometimes used in less urgent situations where the plane can still fly safely, like a landing gear malfunction or single engine failure.

That takes at least 10 minutes, and more like 30+ on a large plane like the B787.

Source: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1456931

That would create a trolley problem dilemma of its own, especially over populated areas.

Now I'm picturing a plane ejecting its wings and somehow sticking the lawn dart landing.

No.

Some aircraft allow fuel dumps but it is a slow process and done at higher elevation relative to the ground.

Here's a Reddit video: https://www.reddit.com/r/ahmedabad/comments/1l9i1ga/om_shant...

And here's a YouTube video showing a Ram Air Turbine (RAT) being deployed on a 787 for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBCGf50Trc&t=69s

But this seems a "first hand" content, not a retweet.

That raises even more questions.

that's actually not true and it's very easy to disprove because SFO is in the top 20

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_i....

I'm sure this is an airport most of the people on this site are familiar with but just in case you aren't, it's on reclaimed land in the San Francisco bay.