Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Initial Speculation on the Air India Crash

What pops out immediately looking at the video of the Ahmedabad Air India crash is that the plane's flaps aren't extended. Speculation starts immediately from there. Two quotes from BBC: 

"When I'm looking at this," aviation analyst Geoffrey Thomas said, "the undercarriage is still down but the flaps have been retracted." 

Another expert, Terry Tozer, said: "It's very hard to say from the video for sure, it doesn't look as if the flaps are extended and that would be a perfectly obvious explanation for an aircraft not completing its take-off correctly." 

Airliner crashes have been caused before by the simple failure to have flaps extended on takeoff. In the old days it was usually caused by distraction or forgetfulness. I have trouble imagining that with modern computerized aircraft that such an obvious failure wasn't accompanied by blaring alarms. But who knows? Stranger things have happened.

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