The Many Possibilities Behind Air India Plane Crash in Ahmedabad

The Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner flight bound for London that crashed within a minute after taking off from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International airport in Ahmedabad Thursday afternoon is a horrific and unspeakable tragedy. It was carrying 242 people including 12 crew on board and plunged into a medical college hostel building just outside the perimeter wall of the runway and has left the nation in deep shock. 

All on board, save one passenger, have perished. And another 20 resident students and interning doctors are believed to have died and the death toll may rise further. Scores have been injured and the building and vehicles in the vicinity have been destroyed in the flames.

It made global headlines and all major television and media channels like CNN, BBC and New York Times have been covering the catastrophe for the past 24 hours. It is one of the world’s worst aviation disasters.

The accident has gripped the imagination of the nation by the vivid video clips circulating widely that shows the ill-fated airplane taking off but within seconds, instead of soaring into the sky, losing lift, struggling to gain height and sinking into a cluster of buildings as it vanishes in a  burst of flames engulfed in a swirl of huge black smoke.

Also read: Ahmedabad Plane Crash: 24 Hours on, Official Death Toll Yet to be Announced; Black Box Found

While any air accident prompts many questions, the immediate response is to look for any survivors, attend to the injured and give medical aid, recover and shift the dead bodies to the hospital for identification and have a helpline and an information centre at the hospital that offer efficient and empathetic service to the relatives of the bereaved and those being treated at the hospital.

The Tatas, owner of Air India, have announced a payment of Rs 1 crore to each of the deceased. The Tata management and government must guard against any complacency setting in dealing with the trauma and legal and moral obligations to the relatives who have lost their loved ones or in pursuing a thorough and honest investigation of the accident in a timely manner, and learn the lessons from this disaster which can be disseminated widely.

Aircraft accident investigations are unbelievably complex, prolonged – they usually take months and at times, even years to pinpoint what went wrong – but the temptations to speculate and jump to conclusions and conspiracy theories are difficult to resist for media anchors and rumour mongers eager to feed into the heightened emotions of the public.

Many aviation experts, analysts and officials with long experience in investigation of accidents and veteran airline pilots, have raised questions after scrutinising the video in circulation and studying the flight radar data and google flight tracker. Greg Faith, a former investigator at National Transportation Safety Board of the US, the lead investigating agency of air crashes, asked: “Did they properly configure the airplane when it took off? What was occurring with them? Was there a loss of thrust? Was there fuel contamination? Fuel starvation where both engines weren’t getting enough fuel that would have caused a loss of thrust of both engines?” 

Other experts have asked if it was a pilot error. The landing gears were down when it was in air, and flaps were not lowered, increasing the drag on the plane compounded by very high temperatures in Ahmedabad at midday straining engine performance. Some pointed out the crash was similar to the Northwest Airlines Flight in 1987 which crashed in Michigan immediately after take-off when the pilots failed to extend flaps and slats for take-off.

There’s also one in a million chance of both engines losing power through bird hits as it happened with a US Airways flight taking off from New York airport flying into a flock of birds within 4 minutes after take off and losing power of both damaged engines. The pilots without losing their cool expertly glided into the Hudson River with no fatalities but some injuries.

That raises the question: are our airports safe for landing and take off. Land encroachments on the funnel, the approach and take-off path of the aircraft beyond the perimeter of the wall have been encroached in airports of India by buildings and real estate development. In the case of Ahmedabad airport, the photographs show a dense cluster of buildings just beyond the runway. 

Though bird hit is possibly ruled out in the present case as no smoke billowed out of the engines before hitting the hostel and blowing up in flames, on whether the loss of power is due to other reasons, former airline pilots have said that if the land was clear of obstacles ahead of the runway, he could have glided and probably succeeded in a soft landing and reduced the damage and loss of lives.

These aspects of land clearance on either ends of runways, not giving licences to abattoirs etc must also be investigated and corrective steps taken across all airports in India.

However, every investigator with experience was unanimous that unless the black box and cockpit voice recorder are retrieved and data are downloaded and deeply studied, no conclusions can or should be drawn. We must wait.

Faith summed up well, “The whole purpose of accident investigation is to identify safety critical issues – if there’s a problem with the airline, the crew, the airplane itself – you want to get those safety critical issues identified and corrective actions implemented sooner than later.”

What makes this Dreamliner accident so intriguing is that this is the most advanced passenger aircraft in the world with blemish-less performance over more than a decade, and 1,100 of them are flying. There were whistleblowers on this plane and the FAA investigated the matter and had cleared it to fly. Now fresh questions may be raised on the manufacturer.

The pilots were highly experienced. So why an accident on a clear day?

There can be a combination of factors. It is well known that Air India has been perennially dogged by issues of shoddy maintenance, inordinate delays and flight cancellations, shabby air crafts, union problems, departments working in silos and not aligned seamlessly and plagued by HR problems which first arose when Air India merged with Indian Airlines, causing heartburn on seniority and salary matters among employees at all levels. 

And after the Tatas took over, the merger of the four airlines – Air India, Air India Express, Vistara, and AirAsia – with different business models and ethos, multiple types of aircrafts and widely different training standards, the problems were further compounded.

An engineer by himself may be highly qualified, a pilot may be highly qualified but if they do not mesh well in heart and mind, they will disintegrate like an aircraft not properly assembled.

Clearly, on that front, the Tatas have a lot of work to do.

A proper investigation with cooperation by the US National Transportation Safety Board, Boeing, Air India technical team led by DGCA will provide us some answers about the crash.

In the US and Europe, a preliminary report is released within five to six months by the regulator and circulated to all airlines for immediate corrective steps and a detailed report is published later after firm conclusions are reached. Indian regulators should ensure we follow that practice. At present, the investigation report does not reach airline operators for 3 to 4 years.

The Tatas have recently opened a very advanced training facility. And Richard Quest, the CNN anchor who reports on aviation, was in India just a week ago, visited this facility and was reportedly quite impressed. Clearly they are prioritising safety. They have to now do it with more rigour and earn the confidence of the public which is fast eroding. 

The public should also not panic. Airline travel continues to be the safest mode of travel by far.

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