All plane crashes horrify us at a visceral level – but yesterday’s Air India disaster is in a league of its own. Flying is meant to be the safest form of travel, so when a near-total calamity such as this takes place, it speaks to our darkest fears.
These days, of course, videos filmed on mobile phones often compound the terror – and the fate of Flight 171 has been revealed on brief, grainy footage, shared across social media, showing the plane’s slow descent into a gigantic fireball.
So what really happened? Can any lessons be learned – and not just by the airline industry, but by passengers such as you and me?
Julian Bray is an aviation-security expert who has advised on some of the deadliest air disasters of the past 40 years. He is a former consultant to British Airways and Alitalia (he also revised several editions of the Italian carrier’s official safety manual).
He says: ‘The Boeing Dreamliner is automated to the nth degree. It is a highly advanced aircraft, with multiple back-up systems, which is why I would look beyond mechanical failure.’
Bray has analysed a number of competing theories…
Did the pilots make a terrible error?
On take-off, a pilot will typically lower the plane’s flaps to generate more ‘lift’. But footage of yesterday’s crash appears to show that the Air India flight’s flaps are still level with its wings. Without the flaps deployed, the plane could not have climbed fast enough, and some have suggested that the pilots might have forgotten to deploy them, leading to disaster.
The Air India plane before its devastating crash
People carry a body away from the crash site
‘It is weird that the flaps seem stuck,’ says Bray. ‘They would have been tested on the runway as part of the pilots’ pre-flight inspection. Not only do pilots walk around the plane to physically inspect its hatches are secure, but inside the cockpit they undergo a raft of procedures carefully designed to check everything.’
So could the pilots have forgotten to deploy the flaps? No, insists Bray. ‘Each stage of take-off is part of a meticulous procedure monitored by the captain and first officer.’
Some have argued that the website FlightRadar24 appears to show the plane starting its run too far down the runway, where it would have had only 1,900 metres to take off instead of the required 2,800 metres – raising the possibility that the pilots started the take-off run too late.
Again, Bray is not convinced. ‘The pilot had 8,000 hours of experience and the co-pilot 1,000 hours. Air India has a pretty good safety record. Pilots get licensed to fly for only six months – after that they get put on a flight simulator and have to be recertified all over again.’
That the aircraft still had its wheels down when it crashed is also unimportant, Bray believes. These are not usually raised until an airliner reaches 1,000 ft. The Air India plane never made it more than 400ft above the ground – 625ft above sea level.
Could it have been mechanical failure?
If something on the aircraft is not working, the captain can order the flight to be grounded.
The fact that Flight 171 took off suggests to Bray that something sudden and unexpected must have happened immediately after take-off. The pilot’s distress call of ‘Mayday… no thrust, losing power, unable to lift,’ confirms a catastrophic failure, says Bray.
‘You wouldn’t lose power, or thrust or the ability to change direction without a major problem further back in the aircraft,’ he explains.
Could the plane have hit a flock of birds?
Bird strikes remain a serious risk for airliners. Last December, a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 suffered a bird strike while coming into land at Muan International Airport in South Korea.
After the pilots aborted the landing and attempted a second one, the plane’s landing gear failed to deploy, causing the aircraft to overshoot the runway and collide with a concrete structure that housed landing lights. Of the 181 people on board, 179 were killed.
Bird strike was also the cause of the forced landing of a jet in New York in 2009, the so-called ‘Miracle on the Hudson’, when pilot Chesley Sullenberger – later played by Tom Hanks in a film about the incident – earned praise for his cool handling of the situation.
But, Bray points out, neither engine of the Air India flight appears to be smoking as the plane went down – if they had been, it would point to a bird strike. He adds that Ahmedabad airport has bird-scarer technology, which detects birds resting on the airport site and emits distress calls from loud speakers mounted on vehicles to scare them away, as well as using hawks to keep bird numbers down.
So could a hawk have been sucked into the engine? Unlikely, says Bray: a bird strike affecting one engine wouldn’t have been sufficient to cause this crash. ‘The plane could have taken off with one engine,’ he says. ‘It would have been a bit bumpy, but the pilots should have been able to perform a “go-around” and fly back to the airport.’
Could it have been pilot suicide?
This risk was brought home in March 2015 when a Germanwings Airbus A320 slammed into a hillside in the Alps, killing all 150 people on board.
The co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, was later revealed to have suffered suicidal tendencies, while a heart-rending cockpit recording revealed the pilot hammering on the door and begging the co-pilot to open up.
The plane never made it more than 400ft above the ground – 625ft above sea level
Suicide has also been suggested as an explanation for the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, where an airliner bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in 2014 disappeared from radar screens and, it is believed, turned around and crashed in the southern Indian Ocean. However, yesterday’s disaster, notes Bray, occurred at a stage of the flight when both pilots would have been at the controls and it would have been hard for one to crash the plane without a struggle.
Could it have been a bomb?
In June 1985, one of Air India’s Boeing 747s en route from Montreal to Heathrow went down in the Atlantic, blown apart by a bomb planted by Sikh extremists and killing all 329 on board.
While Flight 171 clearly didn’t explode mid-air, Bray is concerned by a puff of smoke that appears to come from the plane as it was taking off. One possibility he raises for further investigation is that a device might theoretically have been planted in a highly sensitive location, which did not destroy the fuselage yet succeeded in severing the wires and systems that allow pilots to control the wing flaps and rudder.
A plane like the Dreamliner has multiple emergency systems, says Bray, but a bomb planted in the right place could cause the pilots’ total loss of control.
However, it must be stressed that there has been no suggestion of terrorism from officials either in India or the international investigators, including from Britain, who have rushed to the scene.
Alternatively – and more innocently – he says, a consignment of batteries on board might have spontaneously caught fire – the dangers of so-called ‘thermal runaway’ in lithium batteries are well-known.
Is it still safe to fly?
This is a question that many will be asking as we approach the summer holidays. And, certainly, readers could be forgiven for wondering whether flying has recently become more dangerous.
Already, 2025 has seen several deadly crashes in developed countries, including a commercial disaster in Washington DC that killed 67 people after an American Airlines flight collided with a military helicopter.
Meanwhile, Boeing has suffered a raft of serious accidents recently, including a terrifying ‘gaping hole’ emerging in the side of the fuselage of a flight from Oregon to California in January 2024, with passengers using the on-board wifi to say goodbye to their loved ones.
In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing 737 Max jets crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing a total of 346 passengers and crew.
But despite these disasters, statistics show that flying is the safest it has ever been.
Since 1970, the global fatality rate for air travel has fallen from 4.77 per million passenger journeys to just 0.05.
When you take to the air, you now run just one hundredth of the risk of being killed as you did half a century ago. According to the International Civil Aviation Organisation, accidents on commercial flights – which can be as small as an aircraft being damaged and needing repairs – have fallen from 4.8 per million departures as recently as 2008 to just 1.9 per million in 2023.
Statistics from the US National Transportation Safety Board show that between 2007 and 2023, flying was, mile for mile, by far the safest form of transport. Little comfort, of course, to the devastated families of the victims of Air India Flight 171.
