Hundreds Dead in Air India Boeing Crash

Flight 171 was bound for London’s Gatwick Airport when it crashed near the airport in Ahmedabad, western India. Photo: Associated Press

An Air India Boeing 787-8 passenger jet carrying 242 people bound for London crashed into a residential area Thursday, less than a minute after taking off from the western Indian state of Gujarat. One person is said by Indian authorities to have survived the crash, which was the first fatal incident involving the aircraft known as the Dreamliner.

“There is good news of one person surviving,” said Indian Home Minister Amit Shah, after meeting the person in a hospital in Ahmedabad.

Boeing’s 787, known as the Dreamliner, entered service in October 2011 and had never had a fatal incident.

Boeing posted on X: “We are in contact with Air India regarding Flight 171 and stand ready to support them. Our thoughts are with the passengers, crew, first responders and all affected.”

Thursday’s crash is a fresh blow to the plane maker, which has been mired in safety and production issues in recent years. The Air India accident dents the 787’s excellent safety record. The aircraft model, known as the Dreamliner, hadn’t had a fatal plane crash since it was introduced in October 2011. Like other modern aircraft, it is equipped with advanced safety systems that can aid pilots in emergencies.

Accident investigators are likely to rely on videos of the flight’s final moments, in addition to data from the plane’s flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders, to piece together what went wrong.

The plane, which was headed to London’s Gatwick Airport, had reached an altitude of 625 feet in clear conditions when it stopped transmitting location data, according to Flightradar24, just 50 seconds into the flight. The Boeing plane involved was 11 years old, according to the flight-tracking service.

Local television channels in India showed heavy plumes of smoke rising into the sky and emergency responders carrying people away from the scene on stretchers.

Federation of All India Medical Associations, a resident doctors’ body, said the plane had crashed into a medical hostel and that 50 students were hospitalized as a result, adding that they were in a stable condition. The association said that at least four students were missing, as well as the relatives of at least three doctors. The wife of one doctor had died, it said.

Taxiing

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport

Takeoff

Location sharing stopped shortly after takeoff

Ahmedabad

Flight AI171 crashed in a residential area

Ahmedabad Civil Hospital

Area of detail

India

Gujarat

1 mile

Sources: OpenFreeMap (basemap); FlightRadar24 (flight path); Indian officials (crash site)
Carl Churchill/WSJ

Accident investigators will likely focus on why the aircraft’s landing gear was still down and whether its flaps, which are movable flight-control surfaces on the back of the wings, were in the correct position, according to U.S. pilots and aviation-safety experts. Flaps, along with slats on the front of the wings, help generate aerodynamic lift during takeoff.

“There’s some question about whether the flaps are extended or not, which they would need to be for takeoff,” said John Cox, an aviation-safety consultant and pilot.

The Dreamliner is also equipped with a warning system to alert pilots if the airplane isn’t properly configured for takeoff. “If the flaps were not extended, did the warning system work? Or, he added, “Were they retracted for some reason right after takeoff?”

Cox said it wouldn’t be uncommon for the crew to delay pulling up the landing gear. The airplane’s pitch appeared to be about right, Cox said, but then the pitch increased as the aircraft got closer to the ground, suggesting the wings weren’t creating enough lift to sustain flight. With the nose pointing higher, that would create more drag, requiring more thrust and more lift, he said.

“If you’re already not producing enough lift,” he said, “it’s a very bad place to be because you’ve got a massive amount of drag and not enough lift.”

 

Aircraft flaps on the back of wings, along with slats on the front, are normally extended during takeoff. Accident investigators will likely examine the aircraft's configuration before the crash.

 

Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Source: Boeing
Adrienne Tong/WSJ

 

The plane’s rudder at the rear of the plane doesn’t appear to be deflected, as might be expected with the loss of a single engine, aviation-safety experts said, nor did the airplane appear to yaw, or twist, to either side.

“If there was a loss of thrust, it seems it would be in both engines, not just one,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a former senior accident investigator with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board, who isn’t involved in the crash probe.

“It’s just shocking to me that an airplane as advanced as a 787 can allow this to happen,” he added, noting the plane’s safety systems and sterling record. “There’s so many procedures to ensure that everything is in working order before you add power for takeoff, that it’s a real mystery to me to try to explain what happened.”

The NTSB said Thursday it would lead a team of U.S. investigators traveling to India to assist a probe led by the country’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau.

 

 

Gujarat is the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and some of India’s most prominent business moguls and is one of the country’s most developed states. A large proportion of the Indian diaspora comes from the western state. 

Modi said his government was offering assistance to authorities in Ahmedabad.

“It is heartbreaking beyond words. In this sad hour, my thoughts are with everyone affected by it,” Modi wrote in a post on X.

Air India was for decades the country’s state-run national carrier until Tata Sons, an Indian conglomerate, bought it in 2022. The Indian government had been trying for years to unload the money-losing venture. Tata has worked to modernize the airline’s fleet and improve its safety record in recent years, placing orders for over 500 new aircraft from Boeing and Airbus and upgrading its cabins and premium seats.

Before Thursday, the most recent crash involving the airline was in 2020, when a passenger plane from its budget arm Air India Express skidded off the runway and fell into a valley in the southern state of Kerala, killing at least 18 people.

The Dreamliner is one of Boeing’s bestselling aircraft, with the company so far delivering close to 1,200 of the jets to customers.

Still, the 787 has faced a number of production setbacks. It suffered from early supply-chain issues and then battery fires that led air-safety regulators to ground the 787 fleet for a few months in 2013. Boeing also had to pause deliveries of the aircraft for much of two years because of quality-control problems. More recently, Boeing said the plane’s manufacturing operations had improved.

Gatwick airport on Thursday afternoon had set up an area behind a police cordon on site for relatives of victims, where they were invited to stay to receive more information.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was monitoring the situation in Gujarat and offered his condolences to the families affected.

“The scenes emerging of a London-bound plane carrying many British nationals crashing in the Indian city of Ahmedabad are devastating,” he said.

Write to Shan Li at shan.li@wsj.com, Andrew Tangel at andrew.tangel@wsj.com and Krishna Pokharel at krishna.pokharel@wsj.com